The Coward: A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863
by Henry Morford · English · Gutenberg #36644 · 1,039,182 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Coward: A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863
Author: Henry Morford
Release date: July 6, 2011 [eBook #36644]
Language: English
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Credits: E-text prepared by David Edwards, Josephine Paolucci, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COWARD: A NOVEL OF SOCIETY AND THE FIELD IN 1863 ***
E-text prepared by David Edwards, Josephine Paolucci, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images
generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries
(http://www.archive.org/details/americana)
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THE COWARD.
A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863.
by
HENRY MORFORD.
Author of "Shoulder-Straps," "The Days of Shoddy," etc.
Philadelphia:
T. B. Peterson & Brothers,
306 Chestnut Street.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, 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
THE PATRIOT PRINTERS OF AMERICA--
THE MEN WHO
HAVE FURNISHED MORE SOLDIERS
THAN ANY OTHER CLASS
IN COMPARISON WITH THE WHOLE NUMBER OF THEIR CRAFT,
TO
THE DEAD HEROES OF THE WAR FOR THE UNION
AND
THE LIVING ARMIES THAT YET BULWARK ITS HOPE,--
THIS
BLENDING OF THE FACTS AND FANCIES
OF
WAR-TIME,
IS
DEDICATED BY THEIR BROTHER-CRAFTSMAN,
THE AUTHOR.
_New York City, July, 1864._
PREFACE.
Some persons, taking up this work with expectations more or less elevated,
may possibly lay it down with disappointment after perusal, because it does
not discuss with sharp personalities, as the title may have led them to
suppose, the conduct of some of those well-known men connected with the
Union Army, who have disgracefully faltered on the field. But the truth is
that the Union Army has mustered very few cowards--so few, that a
distinguished artist, not long ago called on to draw an ideal head of one
of that class, said: "Really it is so long since I have seen a coward, that
I scarcely know how to go about it!" The aim of the writer, eschewing all
such tempting personalities, and quite as carefully avoiding all dry
didactic discussion of the theme of courage and its opposite,--has
principally been to illustrate the tendency of many men to misunderstand
their own characters in certain particulars, and the inevitable consequence
of their being misunderstood by the world, in one direction or the other.
No apology is felt to be necessary for the length at which the scenery of
the White Mountains, their actualities of interest and possibilities of
danger, have been introduced into the narration; nor is it believed that
the chain of connection with the great contest will be found the weaker
because the glimpses given of it are somewhat more brief than in preceding
publications of the same series. In those portions the writer has again
occasion to acknowledge the assistance of the same capable hand which
supplied much of the war data for both of his previous volumes.
NEW YORK CITY, _July 1st, 1864._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
A June Morning of Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three--Glimpses
of West Philadelphia--The Days before Gettysburgh--The Two on
the Piazza--Margaret Hayley and Elsie Brand--An Embrace and a
Difference--Foreshadowings of Carlton Brand, Brother and
Lover 29
CHAPTER II.
The Coming of Carlton Brand--Almost a Paladin of
Balaclava--Brother and Sister--A Spasm of Shame--The
Confession--The Coward--How Margaret Hayley heard Many Words
not intended for her--The Rupture and the Separation 45
CHAPTER III.
Kitty Hood and her School-house--Dick Compton going
Soldiering--A Lover's Quarrel, a bit of Jealousy, and a
Threat--How Dick Compton met his supposed Rival--An
Encounter, Sudden Death, and Kitty Hood's terrible Discovery 61
CHAPTER IV.
The Residence of the Brands--Robert Brand and Dr.
Pomeroy--Radical and Copperhead--A passage-at-arms that ended
in a Quarrel--Elspeth Graeme the Housekeeper--The Shadow of
Shame--Father and Daughter--The falling of a parent's Curse 81
CHAPTER V.
The Birth and Blood of the Brands--Pride that came down from
the Crusades--Robert Brand as Soldier and Pension-Agent--How
Elsie raved, and how the Father's Curse seemed to be
answered--Dr. James Holton, and the loss of a Corpus Delicti 99
CHAPTER VI.
The Residence of Dr. Pomeroy--Nathan Bladesden and Eleanor
Hill--A kneeling Woman and a rigid Quaker--The ruin that a
Letter had wrought--A Parting that seemed eternal--Carlton
Brand alive once more, and a Glance at the fatal Letter 120
CHAPTER VII.
A return to 1856--Nicholas Hill, Iron-merchant--His Death,
his Daughter, and his Friend--How Dr. Pomeroy became a
Guardian and how he Discharged that duty--A ruin and an
awakening--The market value of Dunderhaven Stock in 1858 137
CHAPTER VIII.
What followed the revelation of Betrayal--A gleam of Hope for
Eleanor Hill--A relative from California, a projected Voyage,
and a Disappointment--One more Letter--The broken thread
resumed--Carlton Brand's farewell, and an Elopement 164
CHAPTER IX.
Dr. Pomeroy's purposed Pursuit--A plain Quaker who used very
plain Language--Almost a Fight--How Mrs. Burton Hayley
consoled her Daughter, and how Margaret revealed the Past--A
Compact--Dr. Pomeroy's Canine Adventure--Old Elspeth once
more--A Search that found Nothing. 174
CHAPTER X.
Before and after Gettysburgh--The Apathy and Despair which
preceded, and the Jubilation which followed--What Kitty Hood
said after the Battle, and what Robert Brand--Brother and
Sister--A guest at the Fifth Avenue Hotel--A fire-room Visit,
an Interview, and a Departure for Europe 200
CHAPTER XI.
Anomalies of the War for the Union--The Watering-place rush
of 1863--A White Mountain party disembarking at
Littleton--Who filled the Concord coach--The
Vanderlyns--Shoddy on its travels--Mr. Brooks Cunninghame and
his Family--"H. T." and an Excitement 219
CHAPTER XII.
Landing at the Profile House--Halstead Rowan and
Gymnastics--How that person saw Clara Vanderlyn and became a
Rival of "H. T."--The Full Moon in the Notch--Trodden Toes, a
Name, a Voice, and a Rencontre--Margaret Hayley and Capt.
Hector Coles--The Old Man of the Mountain by Moonlight, and a
Mystery 237
CHAPTER XIII.
Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her Pet Bears--A misadventure and a
Friendly Hand in time--The question of Courage--Halstead
Rowan and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame on Geography--The Dead
Washington, the Flume and the Pool--With the personal
relations weaving at that juncture. 255
CHAPTER XIV.
A disaster to Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame--Exit into the
bottom of the Pool--Nobody that could swim, and Margaret
Hayley in Excitement--"H. T." in his element, in two
senses--Another Introduction and a new Hero--Scenes in the
Profile parlor--Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn--The Insult 279
CHAPTER XV.
How Halstead Rowan arranged that expected Duel--Ten-pins
versus bloodshed--Some anxiety about identity--The "H. T."
initials, again--A farewell to the Brooks Cunninghames--An
hour on Echo Lake, with a Rhapsody and a strangely-interested
Listener 298
CHAPTER XVI.
Cloud and Storm at the Profile--Sights and Sensations of a
rainy-day ride to the Crawford--Horace Townsend and Halstead
Rowan once more together--Unexpected Arrivals--A cavalcade of
Miserables--An ascent of Mount Washington, with Equestrianism
and War-whoops extraordinary 323
CHAPTER XVII.
Horace Townsend with a Lady in charge--An adventure over the
"Gulf of Mexico"--Clara Vanderlyn in deadly peril--A moment
of horror--Halstead Rowan and a display of the Comanche
riding--Townsend's eclipse--The return to the
Crawford--Margaret Hayley again, and a Conversation overheard 348
CHAPTER XVIII.
Horace Townsend and Margaret Hayley--A strange Rencontre in
the Parlor--Another Rencontre, equally strange but less
pleasant--How Clara Vanderlyn faded away from the
Mountains--And how the Comanche Rider "played baby" and
disappeared 370
CHAPTER XIX.
A strange Character at breakfast--"The Rambler," and his
Antecedents--What Horace Townsend heard about Fate--Going up
to Pic-nic on Mount Willard--The Plateau, the Rope and the
Swing--Spreading the Banquet--The dinner-call and a cry which
answered it--A fearful situation. 392
CHAPTER XX.
Suspense in danger, in two Senses--Horace Townsend with a
Swing-rope--An invitation to Captain Hector Coles--A fearful
piece of Amateur Gymnastics--Going down into the
Schute--Success or Failure?--The event, and Margaret Hayley's
madness--Two unfortunate Declarations 410
CHAPTER XXI.
The bearer of a Disgraced Name in England--A strange Quest
and a strange Unrest--Hurrying over to Ireland--Too late for
the Packet--The little Despatch-steamer--Henry Fitzmaurice,
the journalist--The peril of the Emerald, and the end of all
Quests save one 432
CHAPTER XXII.
Pleasanton's advance on Culpeper--Crossing the
Rappahannock--The fight and the calamity of Rawson's
Cross-Roads--Taking of Culpeper--Pleasanton's Volunteer
Aide--Townsend versus Coles--The meeting of Two who loved
each other--And the Little Ride they took together 452
CHAPTER XXIII.
Once more at West Philadelphia--September and Change--Last
glimpses of Kitty Hood and Dick Compton--Robert Brand and his
invited Guest--The news of Death--Old Elspeth Graeme as a
Seeress--The dispatch from Alexandria--The Quest of Brand and
Margaret Hayley 478
CHAPTER XXIV.
In the Hospital at Alexandria--The wounded Man and his
Nurse--Who was Horace Townsend?--A Mystery explained--How
Eleanor Hill went back to Dr. Pomeroy's--One word more of the
Comanche Rider--Conclusion 490
THE COWARD.
CHAPTER I.
A JUNE MORNING OF EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THREE--GLIMPSES
OF WEST PHILADELPHIA--THE DAYS BEFORE GETTYSBURG--THE TWO ON
THE PIAZZA--MARGARET HAYLEY AND ELSIE BRAND--AN EMBRACE AND
A DIFFERENCE--FORESHADOWINGS OF CARLTON BRAND, BROTHER AND
LOVER.
A wide piazza, with the columns made of such light tracery in scrolled
plank-work that they seemed to be almost unreal and gave an appearance of
etheriality to the whole front of the house. The piazza, flecked over with
the golden June sunshine that stole down between the branches of the tall
trees standing in front and shading the house, and that crept in through
the network of twine and climbing roses clambering almost up to the roof
from the balustrade below. The house to which the piazza adjoined, large,
built of wood in that half Flemish and half Elizabethan style which has of
late years been made popular through cheap books on cottage architecture
and the illustrations in agricultural newspapers,--two and a half stories
in height, with a double gabled front that belonged to the one, elaborate
cornices and work over the piazza that belonged to the other, and a turret
in the centre that belonged to neither. A wide, tall door opening from the
piazza, and windows also opening upon it, sweeping down quite to the
floor. Altogether a house which approached more nearly to the "composite"
order of architecture so much affected by wealthy Americans, than to any
one set down in the books by a particular designation; and yet shapely and
imposing, and showing that if the most unimpeachable taste had not presided
over the erection, yet wealth had been lavishly expended and all the modern
graces and ornaments freely supplied.
In front of the house, and sweeping down to the road that ran within a
hundred feet, a grassed lawn lying in the lovely green of early summer,
only broken at irregular intervals by the dozen of trees of larger and
smaller sizes, round which the earth had been artistically made to swell so
as to do away with any appearance of newness and create the impression that
the roundness had been caused by the bursting of the trees farther out of
the ground through many years of vigorous growth. Beneath one of the
largest of the trees--a maple, with the silver sheen almost equally divided
between its bark and its glossy leaves, a long wooden bench or settee, with
two or three sofa-cushions thrown carelessly upon it, as if it formed at
times a favorite lounge for a reader or a smoker. On the piazza a triad of
chairs, irregularly placed and all unoccupied. One of the two folding doors
leading into the halls from the piazza, wide open, as became the season,
and the other half closed as if a single puff of summer breeze coming
through the hall had become exhausted before closing it entirely. One of
the windows opening from the piazza into what seemed to be the better part
of the house, closed entirely; and the other, with the shutters "bowed" or
half open, permitting a peep into a large parlor or sitting-room, with rich
carpet and handsome furniture, but kept dusky under the impression (more or
less reasonable) that thereby additional coolness would be secured.
Near the house, on both sides, other houses of corresponding pretension
though displaying great variety in style of architecture; and in front,
across the wide road, still others showing to the right and left, and the
whole appearance of the immediate neighborhood evidencing that it was
neither country nor city, but a blending of both, suburban, and a chosen
spot for the residences of those who did business in the great city and
wished to be near it, and who possessed means and taste to make so pleasant
a selection. Still farther away in front, as seen between the other houses
and shrubbery, and stretching off southward in a long rolling sweep, rich
agricultural country, with some of the hay-crop yet ungathered, broad
fields of grain receiving the last ripening kiss of the sun before yielding
to the sickle or the reaping-machine, and fruit-trees already beginning to
be golden with the apples, pears and peaches glimmering amid the leaves. A
quiet, gentle scene, with evident wealth to gild it and perfect repose to
lend it character; and over all the warm sun of a June morning resting like
a benediction, and a slight shadow of golden haze in the air softening
every object in the perspective. Occasionally a pedestrian figure moving
slowly along one of the foot-paths that bordered the wide road; and anon a
farm-wagon loaded with early produce and on its way to market, rumbling by
with such a sleepy expression on the face of the driver and such lollings
of the ears of the full-fed and lazy horses, that the episode of its
passage rather added to than detracted from the slumberous quiet of the
prospect.
Then another passage, very different and not at all in keeping with any of
the points that have before been noted. An officer in full uniform, with
the front of his chasseur cap thrown high in defiance of the glare of the
sunshine, spurring by on a high-stepping and fast-trotting horse, eastward
towards the city, with such life and haste in every movement of himself and
the animal he bestrode as to momentarily dash the whole view with unquiet.
Then the equestrian figure out of sight and the beat of his horse's hoofs
heard no longer; and the scene relapsing into that languor born of the June
morning verging rapidly towards noon.
Then a sudden sound, still more discordant with the drowsy peace of the
hour than the sight of the spurring soldier, and still more painfully
suggestive of war in the land of peace. The quick, sharp rattle of a
snare-drum, but a little space removed, and apparently passing down one of
the lateral roads in the neighborhood, dying away with a light tap into the
distance a moment after, and quiet coming back again yet more markedly
after so incongruous an interruption.
The place, West Philadelphia, half a mile or more beyond the Schuylkill,
not far from the line traversed beyond the bridge by the Market Street
cars, and near the intersection of that branch of the main artery known as
the Darby Road,--in the outer edge of that beautiful little section with
its tall trees and plats of natural green, out of and into which the
shrieking monsters of the Pennsylvania Central Railroad dart every hour in
the day with freight and passengers to and from the Great West. The time,
late in June, 1863, a few days before Gettysburg, when the long-threatened
invasion of the North by the rebels had become for the moment an
accomplished fact, when Lee and Ewell had crossed the Potomac, swept on
through Upper Maryland, entered Pennsylvania, devastated the farms and
carried away the stock of the farmers on the border, laid York under a
contribution, burned the barracks at Carlisle, and threatened every hour to
capture Harrisburgh and force the passage of the Susquehanna. When women
and children, and by far too many of the able-bodied inhabitants who should
have shown more pride if they indeed possessed no courage, had fled away
from the Seat of Government of the Keystone State, and the public records
were following them to prevent their falling into the hands of an enemy
known to be destructive and revengeful, and for the moment believed to be
irresistible. When the rebels themselves boasted that they were about to
teach the North all the horrors of war that had fallen upon the South in
the long contest,--and that in a few days they would water their
cavalry-horses in the Delaware, if they did not achieve the same success at
the very banks of the Hudson; and when the newspapers of New York and
Philadelphia, for the moment completely discouraged, gave up the line of
defence of the Susquehanna, and gravely debated, whether a check could
indeed be made at the Delaware, with the loss of the Quaker City, or
whether the great struggle must at last be transferred to the Hudson hills
of New Jersey. When the Reserves were mustering in Philadelphia, and the
Coal Regiments forming in the haunts of the sturdy miners. When the
Pennsylvania coal-mines were to be set on fire by the invader, and left to
burn on until all the fuel of the nation was destroyed, if the "great
conflagration" of the whole earth did not follow as a result. When more
placards calling for the defence of the State, were exhibited in the
neighborhood of old Independence Hall, than had ever shown there, inviting
the idle to amusement, in the most prosperous seasons of opera, theatre and
concert-saloon--drums beating at every corner, brass bands blowing on every
square, patriotic appeals and efforts to recruit on every hand, and yet the
people apparently lying under bodily apathy or mental paralysis. When
Governor Seymour, of New York, and Governor Parker, of New Jersey, waiving
the political question for the moment, were calling out the troops of those
States to the defence of Pennsylvania; and when the militia of the city of
New York and the returned nine-months volunteers of New Jersey were showing
themselves equally ready to respond to the call. When the Army of the
Potomac seemed for the moment to be nothing, even for the defence of the
North, Hooker discredited, no successor discovered, public confidence lost,
the very darkest day of the struggle at hand, and no man able or willing to
predict what might be the extent of disaster reached before the rolling
back of the tide of invasion from the homes of the loyal States.
Such were the place, the time, the surroundings, and the atmosphere (so to
speak) of the house of the blended Flemish and Elizabethan styles of
architecture, at West Philadelphia, of which, thus far, only the outward
aspects have been presented. Yet there may be an inexcusable neglect of
the proprieties, in presenting a house, its green lawn, shady trees, and
even the pleasant landscape stretching away in front of it, before those
living figures which would certainly have attracted the attention of an
observer in advance of any of the inanimate beauties of art or nature.
Those figures were two in number, both standing on the piazza, very near
the trellis of climbing roses, and where the flecks of sunshine fell
through the leaves upon them and dashed them with little dots and lines of
moving light, as well as the floor upon which they stood. Both were
girls--both young--both beautiful; at least each possessed that combination
of features, form and manner, making her very pleasing to the casual
observer, and certain to be reckoned beautiful by some one admitted to a
closer knowledge of the spirit enshrined within. They were evidently dear
friends; for as they stood near the trellis, and the hand of the taller of
the two plucked a half-open rose from one of the clusters, and she
playfully tried to coax it to a fuller opening by breathing caressingly
upon it and separating its clinging leaves with her dainty fingers,--the
arm of the other was around her waist, and both the trim and graceful forms
were slightly swaying backward and forward in that pleasant, idle,
school-girl motion which the grown woman does not easily forget until it
has given the "fidgets" to half her elder acquaintances.
The taller and perhaps by a year the elder--she of the rose--was the
daughter of the mistress of that pleasant summer paradise, born to wealth
and position, and her birth registered some two-and-twenty years before in
the predecessor of the heavy family Bible with its golden clasps, which lay
in state in the parlor so near her, as Margaret Hayley. She was a little
above the average height of womanhood, and might have seemed too tall for
grace but for the exquisite rounding of the lithe form, the matchless fall
of a pair of sloping shoulders that could not probably be matched within a
radius of an hundred miles, the graceful carriage of a neck that would
have been long if less elegantly poised, the beauty in shape and spring in
motion of the Arab foot under which the water would have run as easily as
beneath a bridge, and the supple delicacy of the long taper fingers with
their rose-tinted nails, which seemed perfect and high-blooded enough to
have a mission of playing among heart-strings as the fingers of others
might do among the chords of a harp.
In feature the young girl had quite as many claims to attention. The hair
was very dark and very profuse--so near to black that it needed the
sunlight before the golden shadows in the dark brown became fully
apparent--swept plainly down on either side, in the madonna fashion, from a
brow that was very pure, high and clear. The face was handsomely moulded,
rather long than broad, as beseemed the figure, rather pale than ruddy,
though with a dash of healthy color in each cheek that belied any momentary
suspicion of ill health; the nose a little long and somewhat decided, but
very classic in outline and finely cut at the nostril; the eyes dark--so
dark that a careless observer would have lost their brown and called them
black, and their expression a little reserved if not sad and even sometimes
severe; the mouth small and well-shaped, with the lips as delicately tinted
as the faintest blush-rose in the cluster near her, but a shade too thin
for the exhibition of exuberant passion, and showing a slight curl of pride
at the corners of the upper; the chin rounded, full, and forming a pleasant
point for the eye to rest upon as it descended from the face to study the
contour of neck and shoulders. The first appreciative glance at her was
certain to be followed by the suppressed exclamation: "How very handsome!"
and the second by a thought that the lips did not syllable: "How very proud
and queenly!" It might have needed many more than a third, before the gazer
could go to the full depth of a very marked character, and say how much of
that queenly bearing might be ready to bend at last to the magic touch of
the softer passions, and how much of that evident goodness and firmness
might be employed in conveying happiness to others than herself. Among her
peculiarities, she seemed to despise stripes, plaids, sprigs, spots, and
the other endless varieties of color in material; and the lawn which swept
that morning around her erect figure was of a neutral tint and as devoid of
spot as were arms, ears and neck of any ornament in jewelry except a small
cameo at the throat, a slight gold chain around the neck and descending to
the bosom, and a single cluster diamond sparkling on the forefinger of the
right-hand that was dallying with the spirit hidden among the rose-leaves.
No more telling contrast to the tall, majestic girl could well have been
supplied, than her neighbor and dear friend, Elsie Brand (Elspeth,
baptismally, for reasons that will hereafter develop themselves, but always
called Elsie by those admitted to the least intimacy.) She was at least
four inches shorter than Miss Hayley, round and rather plump, though very
graceful in figure, with a chubby face, ruddy cheeks, piquant nose, merry
blue eyes, pouting red lips, full hair coming low down on the forehead and
of that pale gold which the old Scotch poets immortalized as "yellow," in
so many of their lays of the bardic era. Pretty, beyond question, but more
good and attractive-looking than beautiful; and if a second look at
Margaret Hayley would have induced an observation having reference to her
pride, a second at Elsie Brand was certain to bring out the thought if not
the speech: "What a charming, good little girl!" Perhaps a third, with
persons not too severely in training for the great Olympian races of
morality, was very likely to create such a sensation as one experiences in
gazing at a lusciously ripe peach, having particular reference to the pulpy
red lips with their funny pout and kissable look, and ending in a wish that
the crimson love-apples of the modern Hesperides were not quite so
zealously guarded.
Elsie had not yet passed her twenty-second birthday, though she had been
"of age" for a good many twelvemonths, in the estimation of those who had
come near enough to her to feel the beating of her warm heart. Doctor
James Holton, graduate of the Pennsylvania Medical College, and lately a
student with one who had been a student with David Hosack, held his own
peculiar estimation of Elsie Brand, and had almost been driven into rank
atheism from the necessity of both holding and proving that the theory of
our springing from one common father and mother could not possibly be
correct, as the clay of which Elsie was made had been so very different--so
much purer, sweeter and better--from that employed in the moulding of
ordinary mortals!
For some minutes the two young girls had been standing in silence, Margaret
engaged with experiments on her opening rose and Elsie with one arm around
her and lazily observing the operation--both apparently full of that
indolent enjoyment born of ease, content, and the languid air of the summer
morning. Then the little one spoke:
"Margaret, do you know of what I have been thinking for the last two
minutes?"
"Haven't any machine by which I could pry into the droll secrets of your
brain, Elsie, my dear!" answered the taller, pleasantly, but with no smile
upon her lips meanwhile, and apparently with all her attention yet absorbed
in her horticultural experiment.
"Shall I tell you?" queried Elsie.
"Certainly, pet, if you like!" was the reply, the tone, as well as the word
of endearment, showing indefinably that Margaret Hayley thought of herself
as a woman and yet of her companion (of nearly the same age) as little more
than a child.
"I was thinking," said the little girl, "how much of character is sometimes
shown in the action of a moment, and how very different we are."
"Who thought your little head was so philosophical, Elsie?" answered
Margaret, and this time she for a moment deserted her rose and looked
around with a pleasant smile. "Well, the application of your thought to
yourself and to me?"
"Oh," said the little one. "It was only about the rose. I should have
plucked it, if I plucked it at all, and enjoyed it as it was. You are
trying to make something else out of it, and yet show no wish to destroy
the flower. A cruel woman--different from either of us, I hope--would
probably be plucking off the leaves one by one and throwing them away,
without caring how much pain she might be inflicting on the life of the
flower, hidden away down somewhere in its heart."
"A very pretty idea, upon my word!" said Margaret, ceasing to blow upon and
pluck at the leaves, and turning upon her companion a countenance showing
something like surprised admiration. "And what do you make of my character,
Elsie, as shown by my handling of the rose?"
"You must not be angry with me, Margaret," answered the young girl, a
little in the spirit of deprecation. "But you see _I_ should have been
satisfied with the rose as it was, and the other would have been cruelly
dissatisfied with it in any shape, and you----"
"Well, dear? I----"
"You showed that you were not entirely satisfied with every thing as it
was, and that you had a little self-will leading you to force things to be
as you chose, by trying to make that poor little flower outrun the course
of nature and bloom before it was quite ready."
"I think you are right, Elsie," said Margaret, nodding her head in that
slight and repeated manner indicative of answering the mind within quite as
much as any observation from without. "I am _not_ satisfied with every
thing in the world, Elsie. I am not cruel, I hope and believe; but I am
sharper, harder, more requiring than you, and consequently not formed for
half so much true happiness. I _do_ feel like forcing things to be what I
require, sometimes, and then I suppose I grow unamiable."
"You are never any thing else than a dear good girl, with a wiser head than
my rattle-pate, and my own sweet sister that is to be!" and the arm of the
speaker went still more closely around the slight waist it encircled. A
blush as delicately roseate as the first flushings of dawn crept over the
more classic face that bent above her own, the lips above came down to meet
those pouting below, and the two young girls were kissing and embracing as
if they had been two lovers of opposite sexes but very much of one opinion
as to the best office of the lips. Any delicately-nerved old bachelor who
should have happened to pass in front of the house at that moment and catch
a glimpse of the scene just then enacted on the piazza, would certainly
have fainted away on the spot, at the idea of such a waste of the most
delicious of "raw material."
"You may have the rose for your lesson--you see I have not spoiled it,
after all," said Margaret, when the kiss had been given and the rosy flush
died away from her own cheek.
"To give to Carlton?" asked Elsie, as she held out her hand for it.
"No, Carlton must come after his own roses!" was the reply, with the least
dash of pride in the curling of the upper lip.
"And pluck them himself?" asked saucy Elsie.
"Certainly!"
"No matter where he finds them growing--on tree, or on cheek, or on lips!"
continued the young girl, with a light laugh.
For an instant the same flush rose again on the cheek of Margaret Hayley;
then she forced it away, smiled, and said:
"Certainly! why not? Carlton Brand kisses me, sometimes, and I have more
than once kissed him back. What is that to you, sauce-box, when we are
engaged to be married?"
"What is that to me? Every thing! Joy--happiness--to know that I am going
to have so dear a sister!" cried the little one, throwing both her arms,
this time, around the pliant waist of Margaret and hugging her in a perfect
transport of delight, which seemed quite shared in, though more
tranquilly, by the object of the demonstration.
The saddest, cruellest thing in all the lyric drama is the blast of De
Sylva's horn on Ernani's wedding morning, calling him in one instant from
happy love to dishonor or death. Neither in romance nor in nature should
such sudden transitions occur. Alas, for humanity! they do occur in both,
not occasionally but habitually. The Duchess of Richmond's ball--then
Waterloo. De Joinville springs on board his flag-ship to sail for the
attack on Vera Cruz, in the very ball dress in which he has been dancing
the whole night through with the republican belles at Castle Garden. The
Pall is over every thing of earth: how sadly and how inevitably it droops
above the Banner! No scene upon earth could have been more exquisitely
peaceful, and few could have been lovelier, than that which surrounded and
comprehended those two fair girls in their embrace upon the piazza. Wealth,
youth, beauty, good feeling, happiness--all were there; and love blent with
friendship, for was not the embrace, given by Elsie Brand and accepted by
Margaret Hayley, both given and accepted quite as much for her brother's
sake as her own? It was fitting, then, according to the sad fitness of
earth, that the element of discord should enter into the peaceful and the
beautiful.
The officer spurred by, as we have seen him do, gazing only with our
incorporeal eyes. Both the young girls, just releasing each other from
their embrace, saw the dark cloud of war sweeping between them and the
sunlit grain fields. Elsie Brand shuddered and drew back, as if the
incongruity jarred her nature. Margaret Hayley instantly lifted her proud
neck the higher, as if something in _her_ nature sympathized with every
suggestion of the struggle, and as if she was, indeed, insensibly riding on
with the hurrying horseman.
"And what does the shudder mean, little one?" asked Margaret, who had
plainly distinguished it at the moment of release.
"I hate war, and every thing connected with it!" was the reply, the tone
almost petulant.
"And I do _not_ hate it, painful as it may be in many particulars," said
Margaret. "Force and energy are the noblest developments in life. Bravery
is the nearest possible approach to that divine character which knows no
superior and consequently fears none."
"Nearer to the divine than _love_?" asked the little one.
Just for one instant, again, that roseate tint on the cheek of Margaret, as
she said: "Nobler, if not nearer to the divine; and sorry as I must be to
see the bloodshed caused by a civil war in my native land, I am almost glad
that it has occurred, sometimes, as a means of rousing the sluggish pulses
of men who would otherwise have stagnated in trade and pleasure, and
proving that we yet possess something of the hero spirit of old."
"And _I_ am sorry for it all the while, night and day, in my prayers and in
my dreams," answered Elsie Brand, with a sigh. "Hark!" as the tap of the
drum came across from the lateral road before-mentioned. "There is another
reminder of the curse, and one that comes nearer home. Do you remember,
Margaret, that I shall soon have a brother, and you a lover, separated from
us and in terrible danger? They say Harrisburgh must be taken, unless a
very large body of troops can reach it at once. The Reserves will probably
go on, to-night, and Carlton will probably accept his old commission again.
I do want him to do his duty, Margaret, if it _is_ his duty; but I hope
that he will not think so--that he will not go away."
"And _I_ hope that he _will_!" answered Margaret, her tall form drawn up to
its full height, and a look of stern pride upon her face that could not
very well be mistaken.
"To go into danger--perhaps to death?" asked Elsie, looking sadly at the
proud Sibylline face.
"To a thousand deaths, if necessary, rather than towards the least
suspicion of a want of true manhood!"
"Ah, you do not know the trembling fear of a sister's love!" said Elsie,
with a sigh.
"I know a love fifty times deeper!" said Margaret, the pride still on her
face, and yet that ever-returning flush coming up again to say that if love
had not conquered pride it had at least divided the dominion. "Listen,
Elsie Brand, to some words that you may as well understand now as ever.
There is no one near to hear us, and so it is almost like speaking before
heaven alone. I love your brother, deeply, devotedly, with all the power of
my nature--so devotedly that if that love should be wrenched away from my
heart by any circumstance, I know that my life would thenceforth be but one
long, wretched mockery of existence. Happy natures like yours, Elsie, do
not know the absolute agony that lies in such love. And yet I could give up
that love, and my life with it, and would do so, before I would live, love,
and yet _despise_!"
"Despise?--are you speaking of Carlton--of my brother?" asked the young
girl, apparently a little lost in the mysterious energy of her companion's
words.
"I said that I could _not_ despise," Margaret Hayley went on. "I must not,
or we have no future. Do you know that I should have reverenced your
brother more, even if I did not love him better, if he had not refused the
commission in the army tendered him at the commencement of the war? I might
have wept, perhaps mourned--but I should have idolized. Now, I only love a
mortal like myself, where I might have been worshipping a hero!"
"Or sobbing over a grave!" said Elsie, with a sigh which told how easily
she might have been brought to illustrate the word she used.
"What then!" was the quick reply of Margaret. "The glory would have been
his--the loss and grief would have been mine, and I could have borne them.
But he did not choose to enter the struggle, prominent as he had once been
in military movements. He had the excuse of business and occupation, and I
have tried to believe that he needed no other."
"Needed?--what do you mean, Margaret?" cried Elsie Brand in a tone and with
a movement of starting back which evidenced both pain and alarm.
"It is a painful thing, but I must say it, to you, as I do not know that I
could say it to him," pursued Margaret. "I mean, that I have tried to
believe that there was no flaw in my idol--that Carlton Brand, who held
every pulse of my woman's heart responsive to his touch--did not lack the
one manly virtue of _courage_!"
"And would you _dare_ to believe my brother--the man you have pretended to
love--a _coward_?" There was something vexed and sharp, almost angry, in
Elsie's tone, now, that did not promise another immediate embrace like that
of a few moments previous. Margaret Hayley saw the expression of her face,
but neither blenched before it nor seemed to feel any anger at the
manifestation.
"Elsie Brand," she said, her words slow, measured, and with a cadence that
was somehow inexpressibly pained and mournful, "I am no school-girl, and I
am speaking words that I mean. I know your brother to be patriotic, I know
him to be in high health, athletic, vigorous and determined; and have
sometimes believed that if he had possessed that one requisite, animal
courage, he would long ago have been fighting the foes of the republic.
Grieve as I may to part with him, I am glad you believe that he is going
with the Reserves. He had his choice, before, and I let my own heart
instead of my reason have sway, and did not question its propriety. But
were he to hang back now, when his native State is invaded and every arm
necessary to drive back the rebels from Pennsylvania soil, I should know
that he was a coward!"
"I don't like you, Margaret Hayley, when your face looks so and you talk in
that manner!" said the little girl. "But I will not quarrel with you.
Carlton is going with the Reserves, and some day when he is killed or you
hear how he has shamed all the rest with his bravery, you will be sorry for
the words you have just spoken!" Just then the little yellow-haired girl
was the Sibyl, and her prophecy went upon record with the wild words of
Margaret, to be afterwards remembered--how sadly!
"No--do not be angry with me, Elsie," said Margaret, taking the hand that
had been temporarily released. "You have no cause. I have been speaking
against my own heart all the while, much more than against the man whom I
truly love. I know him to be noble and true, and I will believe him brave.
Are you satisfied? Kiss me!" and the proud, statuesque face once more lost
its gravity, to bring back all the joyousness into the rounder and merrier
one from which it had temporarily departed.
The light summer jockey-hat of Elsie lay just within the door, on a chair.
With a quick glance at the watch hidden under her waist-riband, she stepped
within the door, threw on her hat, and was about to terminate her somewhat
prolonged morning-call, when Margaret took it off again, dropped it into
one of the vacant chairs, and said:
"No--do not go away. You have nothing to do at home--mother has gone down
to the city for the day, you know, and I shall be lonely. We shall have
some lunch--you may call it dinner if it will taste any better,--very soon.
Stay till the afternoon--cannot you do so, just as well as not?"
"I suppose so--no, I must see Carlton--yes, though, Carlton will be quite
as likely to come here first as to go home, if he has arranged to go
away--yes, I will stay if you wish it so much!" rapidly answered the little
one.
"That is a good girl," said Margaret Hayley, just as she might have patted
a school hobby-de-hoy on the head. "Now run into the parlor and get the
very nicest book you can find, draw the easy-chair out of the hall, and
enjoy yourself the best you can for just twenty minutes, while I go down
to the kitchen, in ma's place, and see what progress our new Dutch cook has
been making."
She disappeared with the words, and her injunctions were acted upon almost
as rapidly. In half a minute Elsie had the arm-chair out of the hall, and
an illustrated work off one of the tables in the parlor, and was prepared
for her short period of indolent enjoyment.
CHAPTER II.
THE COMING OF CARLTON BRAND--ALMOST A PALADIN OF
BALAKLAVA--BROTHER AND SISTER--A SPASM OF SHAME--THE
CONFESSION--THE COWARD--HOW MARGARET HAYLEY HEARD MANY WORDS
NOT INTENDED FOR HER--THE RUPTURE AND THE SEPARATION.
Not long was the young girl, left at the close of the last chapter bodily
ensconced in an easy-chair on the broad piazza, and mentally absorbed in
the attractions of one of the choicest books in Margaret Hayley's
collection, allowed to pursue her reading undisturbed. Not two minutes had
elapsed when a horseman, riding a chestnut horse of handsome appearance and
fine action, came rapidly up from the direction of the city, dismounted
with the same practised grace that he had shown when in the saddle, threw
the rein of his horse over one of the posts standing near the gate, opened
that gate and came up the walk, without attracting the attention of the
young lady on the piazza, or that of any other occupant of the house he was
approaching.
Lifting from his brow, as he approached the house, to wipe away the slight
moisture which had gathered there even in riding, the broad-brimmed and
low-crowned hat of light gray, which so well accorded with his loose but
well-fitting suit of the same color, he gave an opportunity for studying
the whole man, which could not well have been attained under other
circumstances; and both narrator and reader may be excused for stopping him
momentarily in that position, while due examination is made of his most
striking outward peculiarities.
He was at least five feet eleven inches in height, with a figure rather
slight than stout, but singularly erect, sinewy, and elastic, every
movement giving evidence that the body could not well be set to a task
beyond its power of endurance. The foot was not very small, but
well-shaped, and the ungloved hand which held his riding-whip was almost
faultless in shape and color. The hat removed, a brow rather broad than
high was seen, with a head well balanced in all the intellectual and moral
requirements, densely covered with light, curling hair, of that peculiar
shade which the poetical designate as "blonde" and the practical as
"sandy." The complexion, though the cheeks were a little browned by the
summer sun, was very fair, and that of the brow as stainless as any petted
girl's could be. The features were nearly faultless in the Greek severity
of their outline, the nose straight and well cut, the mouth small but with
full curved lips, the eyes of hazel, widely set. The lower part of his face
was effectually concealed by a luxuriant full beard and moustache, a few
shades darker than his hair, and showing a propensity to curl on slight
provocation. He was a decidedly handsome man of twenty-eight to thirty,
erect, gentlemanly, dignified, and with something in his general appearance
irresistibly reminding the spectator of the traditional appearance of those
blonde Englishmen of good birth, who seem made to dawdle life away without
exhibiting one of the sterner qualities of human nature, until deadly
danger shows them to have that cool recklessness of life which charged two
hundred years ago with Prince Rupert and ten years ago with poor Nolan. Yet
this was the idea more likely to be formed of him and his capabilities, by
strangers and those who lacked opportunity to examine his face and manner
closely, than by those intimately acquainted with both; for there was an
occasional nervousness in the movement of the hands, and even of the whole
figure, that to a close observer would have belied the first-assumed
self-confidence; and a something drooping, tremulous, and undecided in the
lower lip at the corners, was so well matched by a sad and even troubled
expression that often rested like a cloud over the eyes, that the whole man
seemed to be made into another self by them.
Such was Carlton Brand, the brother of Elsie, about whom the tongues of the
two young girls had wagged so unreservedly but a few minutes before. Such
was his appearance, to the outward eye, as, hat still in hand, he
approached the piazza. Elsie was sufficiently absorbed in her book, not to
feel his presence; and it was not until he was close upon her that the
young girl saw him, flung down the costly illustrated volume in her chair
with less care than might have pleased the less impulsive owner, sprang to
the step and seized both the occupied hands of the new-comer, with a warmth
that showed how cordial was the affection between brother and sister, so
widely different in appearance and indication of character.
"How did you come here, pet?" the brother asked, as soon as his mouth was
free from the kiss his sister tendered.
"Oh, ran across the fields half an hour ago, and intended to be back home
by this time, only that Margaret was alone and wished me to stay; and
besides----"
"Well--besides what?"
"Besides, I almost knew that you would stop _here_ before you went home,
and I should see more of you before you went away, by remaining."
Could the young girl but have seen the quick spasm of agony that just then
passed over the face of Carlton Brand--the agitation and trembling which
seized upon lip and hands--she might have been wiser the next moment, but
she certainly would not have been happier. Just for that one moment there
seemed to be lack-lustre vacancy in the eyes, total want of self-assertion
in face and figure, and the handsome, noble-looking man actually seemed to
have collapsed, bowed, and sunk within himself, so that he was more an
object of pity than of envy. But the sister's eyes were fortunately turned
away at that instant, and she saw nothing. When she looked at him again,
the spasm, whatever it might have been, was gone, and she only saw his
usual self. He did not reply to her last suggestion, but asked, after an
instant of hesitation:
"Where is Margaret?"
"Gone down into the kitchen for a few moments, to look after a new Dutch
cook, but she will soon return. And so you are really going away, brother,
and I shall be so lonesome!" and the hand of the sister sought that of the
dearly-loved brother again, as if every moment lost without some touch of
one who was so soon to leave her, was lost indeed.
Even to this the brother gave no reply, but made a remark with reference to
the rapid ripening of the grain in the wheat-fields that skirted the road
beyond. A duller wit than that of Elsie Brand might have become aware that
he was avoiding an unpleasant subject; and the young girl recognized the
fact, but gave it an entirely erroneous explanation, believing that he must
have heard some peculiarly threatening news from the scene of the invasion,
making the peril of the troops about to leave more deadly than it would
have been under ordinary circumstances, and that he dreaded to enter upon
the theme at all, for fear of alarming her. As a consequence, her next
words were a disclaimer of her own fears.
"Oh, Carlton, you need not be afraid to speak of it to me. Much as I have
dreaded your going away, I know, now, that it is your duty, when your own
State is invaded; and I have made up my mind to bear the separation, and
even to think of you, my own dear brother, as in danger, without saying one
word to hold you back."
"Have you?" That spasm was again upon his face, and the words were hoarse;
but again the eye and the ear of the sister missed the recognition of any
thing unusual.
"Yes; and so has Margaret."
"Has she?" The spasm had not gone off his face, and the second question was
asked even more hoarsely than the first. For some reason that the young
girl could not understand, he turned away from her, walked down to the end
of the piazza, and stood looking off. What he was suffering at that moment,
with three or four of the most powerful passions known to humanity tearing
at his heart-strings at once, none may know who have not passed through the
same terrible ordeal which he was then enduring. There were only the fays
who may have been playing among the green grass, and the dryads yet
lingering among the whispering leaves of the maples, looking in at the end
of the piazza upon his face: had they been human eyes, what of wrestling
and struggle might they not have seen! When he turned to walk back towards
the spot where his sister was standing in surprise not unmingled with
alarm, his face was again calm, but it would have shown, to the observant
eye, a calmness like that of despair. His words, too, were forced when they
came:
"You and Margaret both, Elsie, love me so well, I know, that you would give
up almost any thing to please me; but I do not intend to task either of you
too far. I am not going--that is, business detains me so that I cannot--I
am not going to Harrisburgh."
"Business!" Elsie Brand had never before, in her whole young life, uttered
a word so hardly or in a tone so nearly approaching to a sneer, as she
spoke the single word at that moment. Were the words of Margaret Hayley
ringing in her ear, and did she find some terrible confirmation, now, of
what had before been so impossible to believe? "Business!--what business,
Carlton, _can_ be sufficient to keep you at home when they seem to need you
so much?"
"What do _you_ know about it?" and _his_ tones were harsh and almost
menacing. "Do we ask you women to decide what we shall do, where we shall
go, and where we shall stay?"
"Oh, Carlton!" and the cry seemed to come from the very heart of the young
girl. It was perhaps the first harsh word that had ever fallen on her ear,
aimed at her from the lips of the brother she so adored. God only knew the
agony under which that harsh word had been wrung out, as only he could know
the agony it might cause! The cry instantly melted the heart to which it
appealed. Carlton Brand took the hand of his sister in his own, kissed her
tenderly, and said:
"Forgive me, Elsie, if I spoke as I should never speak to _you_! But you do
not know, sometimes, what moves men to harshness which they afterwards
bitterly repent."
"But you are not going with the regiment?" again she asked.
"No!--I have told you I was not, Elsie!" and the tone came very near to
being a harsh one, once more.
"I am sorry--very sorry, Carlton!"
"Sorry?" and the often-recurring spasm which again passed over his
features, could not have been unobserved by the young girl, for her own
face seemed to reflect it. "Sorry? Are you indeed sorry that I am not going
into--that I am not going to be absent from you?"
"Oh, no, Carlton! heaven knows I am not!" said Elsie, and the merry blue
eyes were filled with tears. "But I think you ought to go; and you do not
know, Carlton, how much may hang upon it. Do you love Margaret--really and
truly love her?"
"Love her? as my own soul!" answered Carlton Brand. He did not say "as his
own _life_"! "Why do you ask, after all that you have known of our
attachment and our engagement?"
"Because, Carlton"--and the young girl, weeping the while under an impulse
of feeling that she could scarcely herself understand, caught him by the
arm and drew down his head towards her--"because I believe that if you do
not go with the Reserves, Margaret will think that you do not do so
because--oh, I cannot speak the word!"
"Because what? Speak it out!" and he seemed to be nerving himself to meet
some shock that was likely to need all his energies.
"Because"--in a voice very low and broken--"because you are afraid to
go--because you are a _coward_!"
"Has she said as much?" and the eyes of the speaker, very sad, troubled,
and almost wild, seemed still to have power to read the very soul of the
young girl before him. Elsie could not speak at first, but she nodded
twice, and never death-bell of a condemned criminal rung out more clearly
or more frightfully on the startled air, tolling the knell of a last hope,
than the whisper that came at last from her lips:
"Yes!"
"Then God help me!" came from those of the strong man, in such a
manifestation of agony as was painful to behold, while his hands for one
moment clasped themselves together as if he would wring them in womanish
weakness, then went up to his face and spread themselves as if they would
shut it away forever from human sight. "God help me!--and you, Elsie,
despise me if you will, but, oh, help me to keep it from _her_. I dare not
go! I _am_ a coward! If I should go into battle I should disgrace myself
there forever, by running away at the first fire, and that would break our
poor old father's heart!"
"Carlton! Carlton! my poor brother!" and the hands of the young girl closed
around one of her brother's, with so warm a pressure as proved that she did
not think of any shame, disgrace or fault in the connection, but only as
the announcement of some great misfortune.
"Yes, Elsie, you have wrung from me the confession that I hoped never to be
obliged to make to any one but my God. I have made it to Him, oh, how many
times, and I almost feel that he has forgiven me, as my fellow-men will
never do. I have been a coward, I suppose, from my very cradle and heaven
only knows how I have managed to conceal the terrible truth from you, all
this while! The very sight of blood sickens me, even when it is only the
blood of beeves in a slaughter-house. One spirt from the arm of a man when
he is being bled sets every nerve to trembling, and sometimes sends me
fainting to the floor. One moment among the horrible sights of battle--the
groans, and shrieks, and crashing bullets and spouting blood of
carnage--would drive me mad or send me flying away with the curses of my
whole race ringing in my ears."
"Oh, Carlton! my poor brother!" repeated once more, and in the same tone of
heart-broken sympathy, was all that Elsie Brand could answer to this
humiliation of the one to whom, perhaps, next to God, she had ever looked
up as to His noblest human manifestation of greatness in creative power.
"Do you see what a poor miserable wretch I am?" he went on, apparently
forgetful that any one besides his sister might be within hearing, and she
so absorbed in the grief and shame of the revelation that she possessed no
more forethought. "Think of me as an officer in my regiment, and know with
what a reddened face I must have walked the streets when we paraded,
conscious that if suddenly called to duty--even the quelling of a mob at
the street-corner--I should be obliged to disgrace myself at once and
forever! Think what I have suffered since the war broke out!--commission
after commission offered me--loving my country as I believe man never loved
it before--and yet not daring to strike one blow in its behalf. Obliged to
make slight excuses when others have inquired why I did not go to the
war--obliged to wear a double face, a mask, everywhere and at all
times--dreading detection every day, and in that detection perhaps the loss
of my proud father's life and of the love that has made the only hope of my
own--cursing the omen that unwittingly gave me the brand of the coward in
my very name--racked and tortured thus, and yet obliged to hold an
honorable place among my fellow-men--it has been too hard, Elsie, too hard!
And now to lose all! If _she_ has learned to suspect me--I know her brave
heart and her proud nature--I shall lose her, the richest, noblest thing on
earth, half grasped, to be mourned for as never man yet mourned for woman!
Do help me, Elsie! Help me to conceal my shame--to deceive her, yes--God
help me!--to deceive _her_ before whom my very soul should be laid bare--so
that she will not know me for the miserable wretch and coward that I am!"
And all this while his face was wrought and contorted, at short intervals,
by those fearful spasms of shame and mental suffering; and ever and anon
his hands locked together and seemed to wring themselves even beyond his
own volition. How different he looked, at that moment, from the handsome,
noble man, in the full pride of mature adolescence, who had stepped upon
that piazza but a few moments before!
"I would do any thing in the world to help you, Carlton; but what _can_ I
do?" faltered the young girl, who saw no light beyond the thick, black
cloud of shame and ruin slowly settling down on the head of her beloved
brother.
"Help me to conceal the truth"--he went on--"to enforce any excuse for not
leaving the city at this moment! I know it is base and contemptible, but it
is for a good purpose, Elsie--to save a heart that is already distracted,
and a life that must be wrecked without it. We may never be placed in the
same circumstances again--the war may soon be ended--if she can only be
kept from knowing this, I may never be placed in the same peril again, and
my whole life shall be one long proof that I am not otherwise unworthy of
the woman I love so madly."
"It does not need, Carlton Brand!" sounded a voice from within--a voice
that both recognized but too well; and out of the hall came the figure of
Margaret Hayley.
Her words and her manner alike proved that she had heard all, or at least
enough; for there was an expression of withering contempt flashing out of
her dark eye and curling her proud lip, not easily to be borne by any
person towards whom they were directed. There did not seem, for the moment,
to be any thing like pity in her composition; and if there had been love
within her heart, it appeared to have been so crushed out by one stunning
blow that it could never bloom again any more than the wild flower ground
beneath the heel of the wayfarer. Her head was proud, erect, haughty,
disdainful; and one who had leisure to examine her closely would have seen
that the nostril was opening and shutting convulsively, as if overwhelming
passion was only suppressed by the physical act of holding the breath.
Elsie Brand was too much dizzied and confused to be quite aware what had
happened or what was about to happen. She merely uttered a cry of agitation
and fright, and shrunk back alike from her brother and the woman who had
come to be his judge. Carlton Brand saw more, with the quick eye of the
lawyer and the sharpened perception of the lover. He realized that Margaret
Hayley had heard his agonized and unmanly confession--that anger and scorn
had driven away from her face the love which had so often and so pleasantly
beamed upon him--that his doom was sealed.
With the knowledge came back to him that manliness in demeanor of which he
had been so sorely in need a moment before. In the presence only of his
sister, and when pleading with her to assist in rescuing him from the pit
of grief and shame into which he felt himself to be sinking, he had been
humble, abject, even cowering. Now, and in the presence of the woman for
whose softened opinion he would have given the world and almost bartered
his hopes of heaven,--he stood erect, and if the spasm of pain did not
entirely pass away from his face, at least it changed in its character so
that he was a man once more.
"I understand you, Miss Hayley," were the first words he spoke. "You have
heard some words not intended for your ear. You have been _listening_."
"If you merely mean that I have heard what was not intended for my ear, you
certainly speak the truth, Mr. Brand," she replied, catching the formality
of his address at once. "But if you mean that I have listened meanly, or
even voluntarily, to words intended to be confidential, you wrong yourself,
equally with me, in saying so. You have spoken so loudly that not only I
but even the servants in the house could not well avoid hearing you; and
there is not much 'listening' in hearing words almost brawled on a piazza."
Her words were very bitter--they beseemed the lips from which they flowed.
A man who loved her less or, who had fewer of the natural impulses of the
gentleman than Carlton Brand, might only have thought of the taunt conveyed
and forgotten its justice. He did not do so, but bowed at once with an air
of respectful humility, and said:
"I beg ten thousand pardons for my hasty speech. I was mad when I made it.
Certainly you have heard nothing but what you had a right to hear." And
then he stood erect but silent.
Poor little Elsie Brand could contain herself no longer. How she loved her
brother, only the angels knew. How easily we pardon, in those of our
kindred, what would be indelible disgrace in the characters of others, all
close observers of humanity know too well. Little Elsie Brand was only
acting the part of nature in espousing the cause of her own blood, and
saying, before time enough had elapsed for any additional words between the
two principals:
"Margaret Hayley, I say that you are too hard with Carlton! If you had ever
loved him, as you pretended, you would not be so! There, you have not asked
my opinion, but you have it!"
The words, though kindly meant, were ill-advised. Not even her brother, who
had but a few moments before been imploring her assistance, thanked her
for what she had then spoken. At least he silenced her for the time with--
"You can do no good now by speaking, Elsie. It is too late. Miss Hayley has
something more to say to me, no doubt, after what she has accidently heard;
and I am prepared to hear it." He stood almost coolly, then, the bared head
bent only a very little, and the face almost as calm as it was
inexpressibly mournful. So might a convicted criminal stand, feeling
himself innocent of wrong in intent, beaten down under a combination of
circumstances too strong to combat, awaiting the words of his sentence, and
yet determined that there should be something more of dignity in his
reception of the last blow than there had ever been in any previous action
of his life.
Twice Margaret Hayley essayed to speak, and twice she failed in the effort.
If she had been calmly indignant the moment before, Nature had already
begun to take its revenge, and she was the woman again. Her proud head was
bent a little lower, and there was a dewy moisture in the dark eyes, that
could never be so well dried up as in being kissed away. Who knows that the
proud woman was not really relenting--letting the old love come back in one
overwhelming tide and sweep away all the barriers erected by indignation
and contempt? Who knows how much of change might possibly have been
wrought, had the next words of Carlton Brand been such as indicated his
belief that the chain between them was not yet severed utterly? Who knows,
indeed?--for his words were very different.
"Miss Hayley, I have waited for you to speak what I feel that you have to
say. You have heard words that no betrothed woman, I suppose, can hear from
her promised husband and yet retain that respect for him which should be
the very foundation of the marriage-bond."
"I have." The words came from her lips in tones much lower than those in
which she had before spoken, and she did not even look at him as she
answered.
"You have heard me declare myself--I know by the face you wore but a moment
since, that you have heard all this--what you hold to be the lowest and
most contemptible thing on God's footstool--a _coward_."
"I have. I would rather have died on the spot than heard those words from
the lips of the man I have--have loved!" The words still low, and some
hesitation in those which concluded the sentence. One would almost have
believed, at that moment, that of the two the culprit was the down-looking
and low-voiced woman, instead of the man whose godlike presence so
contradicted the dastardly vice he was confessing.
"I have no defence to offer," the speaker went on. "If you have heard all
that I believe, no further explanation is necessary. You know the worst;
and as a proud woman, with honor unspotted and beyond suspicion, you have a
right to pass what sentence you choose upon my--my shame, my crime, if you
will!"
Perfect silence for an instant, then a broken sob from Elsie, whose face
was streaming with tears denied to both the others, and who was leaning her
forehead against the sharp corner of one of the columns of the piazza,
apparently that the slight physical pain thus inflicted might do something
to still the mental agony that raged within. Then Margaret Hayley, as if
she had passed through a long struggle but conquered at last with a triumph
slaying her own soul, raised her head, drew in a hard breath, shook back
one of the tresses of her dark hair which had fallen over her brow, and
spoke:
"Do you know, Carlton Brand--I cannot call you _Mr._ Brand again, for that
address is mockery after what we have been to each other--do you know what
that sentence must be, in justice to myself and to you?"
"I can guess it, Margaret Hayley," was the answer, the prefix changed again
in imitation of her, just as she a moment before had changed it in
imitating him. The incident was a mere nothing, and yet suggestive as
showing how closely the two seemed to study each other, and how much of
real sympathy there must after all have been between them. "I can guess it,
and I will try to bear it."
"You can guess it--you do guess it--separation!" said Margaret in a low
voice that she could not quite render firm.
"I was not mistaken--I supposed as much," he answered. "You are a proud
woman, Margaret, and you could not marry a man for whom you failed to
entertain respect--"
"I _am_ a proud woman, but a woman still," said Margaret. "You whom I have
loved so truly, can best guess the depth of my woman's nature. But I cannot
and will not marry a man to whom I cannot look up and say: 'This man has
the courage and the will to protect me in every peril!'"
"Have you ever had reason to believe that I could not and would not protect
you, if need came, against all the world?" and his eyes momentarily
flashed, at that thought, with a light which should not have shone in the
orbs of a coward.
"Words are idle, Carlton Brand!" said Margaret. "There is no protection so
sacredly due as that of a strong man to his country. You know it, and I
know it as well. The man who knows his duty to his country and dares not do
it, through sheer bodily fear, could not be trusted in any relation. His
wife would not dare trust him, if she knew it; and you have opened my eyes
but too painfully. And so, in mercy to both, all must be over between us--"
"Oh, do not say that, Margaret, sister!" broke out Elsie, in a more
faltering voice than she had ever used in pleading for herself since the
earliest day of childhood. Margaret did not heed her, if she heard, but
went on from the point at which she had been interrupted:
"All is over between us, Carlton Brand, at once and forever, unless----"
"Unless?--what is the possibility you would yet hold out to me?" and the
speaker showed more agitation, at that one renewed glimpse of hope, than he
had done when battling against utter despair.
"Unless you will yet obey the summons that has called you with every other
true son of Pennsylvania to the field, and prove to me that you did not
know yourself or that you were endeavoring to play a cruel part in
deceiving your sister and me!"
The face of Carlton Brand had been comparatively calm, ever since the
coming out of Margaret. Suffer as he might, most of the suffering had been
hidden. Now that face assumed an aspect that was really fearful to behold.
The veins on his forehead swelled as if they would burst, his lip set hard,
his eyes glared as if one touch might have made him a maniac, and his hands
worked convulsively. All the symptoms of extreme terror and of a repugnance
which no effort could overcome, were imminent in every glance and motion;
and something of those phenomena was exhibited which we may suppose the
Highland seer of old time to have shown, when he was carried beyond himself
by the invisible powers, and saw battle, defeat and horrible death for
himself or others, slowly unrolling before his spiritual sight. Elsie Brand
shuddered and drew back to the column which had before sheltered her.
Margaret Hayley still stood erect, though she was evidently laboring under
suppressed excitement, and none could say what the end of this scene might
be. It was quite a moment before Carlton Brand could command himself
sufficiently to speak, and then he said in a low, broken voice:
"No--I cannot. I cannot kill my poor gray-haired old father with the
spectacle of the flight and disgrace of his only son."
"And you have decided well," said Margaret. "It is a bitter thing to say,
but I am glad that you have marked out my course as you have done.
Think--oh heaven!" and she seemed indeed to be for the moment addressing
the powers above instead of those regnant upon the earth--"think how near I
came to being this man's wife and the possible mother of his children, each
one marked with the curse set upon them by their father!" No human ear
could have heard the whisper which followed: "Enough of disgraces
descending from parents--oh, heaven!"
"You are right, Margaret Hayley--right!" spoke Carlton Brand, his voice
lower, more hoarse and broken than it had been at any part of the long
interview. "You have reminded me well of your duty and mine. The day may
come when you will be sorry for every word that has fallen from your lips;
but it may not. To-day you are doing right--let the future take care of
itself. Good-bye!"
He took the long, slender white fingers in his, and looked upon them a
minute, the tears at last gathering in his eyes. Then, when through the
thickening drops he could scarcely see them longer, he raised them to his
lips, pressed a kiss upon them, dropped the hand and strode off the piazza
and away, never once looking back as he passed down the path towards the
gate.
Margaret Hayley had been overstraining both heart and brain, and the
penalty asserted itself very soon. Her discarded lover was scarcely half
way down the path when the revulsion came, and pride for the moment broke
down before her terrible sorrow. The proud neck bent, she stretched out her
arms after the retreating figure, the single word, "Carlton!" came half
whispered and half groaned through her lips, her eyes closed, and she sunk
fainting into the arms of Elsie.
Carlton Brand did not hear the call. A moment, and still without another
glance at the house where he was leaving behind the happiness of a life, he
had unloosed the splendid chestnut pawing at the gate, swung himself into
the saddle and ridden away westward. He reeled a little in his seat as he
rode, as a drunken man might have done--that was all the apparent
difference between the man with a hope who had arrived half an hour before
and the man who now departed without one.
CHAPTER III.
KITTY HOOD AND HER SCHOOL-HOUSE--DICK COMPTON GOING
SOLDIERING--A LOVERS' QUARREL, A BIT OF JEALOUSY, AND A
THREAT--HOW DICK COMPTON MET HIS SUPPOSED RIVAL--AN
ENCOUNTER, SUDDEN DEATH, AND KITTY HOOD'S TERRIBLE
DISCOVERY.
"I do not care, Dick Compton! You are a mean, good-for-nothing fellow, and
the sooner you go away and get killed, the better. I hope I may never set
eyes on you again, as long as I live."
A pleasant style of address, especially from a pretty woman; and yet one to
which a good many persons have submitted, first and last, from little
people whom they could physically have slain with a single stroke and
mentally discomfited with very little more trouble!
The time of this objurgation was the same morning on which the events took
place which have already been recorded as occurring at the residence of
Margaret Hayley, and at a very little earlier hour than that which
witnessed the departure of Carlton Brand from the place of his signal
discomfiture. The place was in front of a little country-school-house
standing half a mile from the Darby road, north-westward, and perhaps two
miles westward from the Hayleys. The interlocutors were Richard Compton
(already introduced as "Dick" by the flippant tongue of his companion), a
young and well-to-do farmer of the neighborhood, about a quarter of a
century old, perhaps some five feet nine in height, thickset,
strong-limbed, with a round, good-humored face guiltless of beard but
browned a good deal by exposure in the field, generally smiling and
content, but with a spice of the bull-dog in his nature which made him
sullen occasionally and led him always to be very fond of his own peculiar
way;--and Kitty Hood, teacher of the district school of that particular
section of the Keystone State, a short, round, rosy little lass, with merry
brown eyes that only occasionally had a sterner kind of mischief in them,
dark brown waved hair, and just the last general appearance in the world
that a phrenologist would have selected for the necessarily calm and
dignified life of an instructress of callow youth.
The old weather-beaten school-house, erected perhaps fifty years before but
not yet swept away in the prevailing rage for staring new white baby-houses
for the instruction of children in the country, stood at the base of a
slight wooded hill, facing southward; a fine old sycamore near the door
holding the whole house and all its contents in flecked light and shade; a
group of locusts not far away to the left showing a motley jumble of
benches beneath, that were evidently the favorite lounging-place of the
children during play-hours; and a little pond of a hundred or two feet in
diameter, with one edge half covered with the leaves of the intrusive
pond-lilies, and the other bordered by a juvenile wharf of stones, old
boards and bark, supplying the youngsters with a place in which to paddle,
sail boats and get very wet without any danger of being drowned, in summer,
and with a reliable though limited skating-ground in winter. Its
convenience for winter sports could only be imagined, at that season of the
year when the wild-roses were clambering up the dingy boards of the
inclosure, to the windows of the school-room; but its inevitable use as a
part of the great "highway of nations" was too plainly shown by a
circumstance which, alas!--at the same moment illustrated the vicissitudes
of commerce and the necessity for the existence of insurance companies. A
stately vessel of the mercantile guild, twelve inches in length but with
the dignity of three masts and each holding spitted on it as a sail nearly
an entire half-sheet of foolscap paper, had evidently left the little wharf
during the morning play-hour, freighted for the Spice Islands lying up
among the pond-lilies, but suffered the fate of many sea-going ships,
fallen under the power of foul winds or adverse currents, and stranded on
a reef of mud some paces from the shore, from which the ingenuity of her
factors had not yet been able to release her, and where she lay "keeled
over" in a manner equally contaminating to her white paper sails and
unpleasant to her possible passengers. No doubt anxious eyes were meanwhile
glancing out of the windows, between two leaves of the geography which
detailed the perils of navigation in the East Indian archipelago, to see
whether piratical canoes or pirogues did not put off to burn that noble
vessel and massacre her crew, before noon should give time for any further
efforts towards her release. Here the course of this narration painfully
but necessarily loses sight of the good three-master "Snorter, of
Philadelphia," as many another of the fairy barks launched by inexperienced
youth disappears from view and is known no more forever; but let us hope
that this particular venture was floated off at some early "spring tide" of
play-spell, and that she "came safely to her desired haven!"
Within the little one-story school-house, with its unpainted desks and
benches of pine, dark with age and scarred by notch and inscription from
the penknives of half a century of school-boys,--there was going on, at
that moment, precisely what may be seen in any school from Windsor to
Washoe, when the ruling power is temporarily absent. Wilkie painted not
only from life, but from the inevitable in life, when he drew the "Village
School in an Uproar;" for mobs have been put down by the military power and
even savage communities have been made quiet by the exercise of
powder-and-ball; but no force has yet been discovered that could check (and
who would wish it to be entirely checked, after all?) the riotous mischief
of the school-room when the terrible eye is removed! Five minutes before,
Mistress Hood in the chair of authority, fifty heads of all hues and all
textures had been more or less closely bent down over book and slate, and a
low monotonous hum, something like the sleepy drone from a score of
bee-hives, had been heard floating out on the summer air. Now, Mistress
Kitty Hood had been just two minutes absent from the school-room, and a
nice little Pandemonium was already established, that it would need some
birchings and many strong words to annihilate. Half a dozen of the big boys
had gathered into a knot, not far from the door, and were snickering aloud
and pointing knowingly towards the point of interest without, with running
comments on "Miss Hood's beau!" Three little girls, forgetting their sex,
were playing at leap-frog between and over two of the benches, to the
disarrangement of their short skirts and the eventual tumbling over of one
of the benches with a loud clatter. Two or three of the larger girls were
in close conversation, about what there is no means of knowing except that
one of them remarked that "it was real indecent and she meant to tell her
ma!" One boy, who was the possessor of a magnificently national
handkerchief, had stuck it on the end of the long ruler from the mistress'
desk, and was going through a dress parade of one, with a feeble whistle as
music. A young brute was taking the opportunity of pinching the ear of a
smaller boy, and making him whimper, as a punishment for some previous
alleged injury. Another had made a pair of spectacles out of blue paper,
and stuck them on the nose of a little girl on one of the near benches, who
blushed so rosily that her white dress, blue spectacles and red face quite
supplied the national colors. And still another, with cheeks marvellously
distended, was trying whether he could, in the short space of time during
which the mistress might be absent, manage to choke down three early
harvest-apples without dying by strangulation or requiring any assistance
from his companions.
Such were the surroundings of the country school-house, and such was the
aspect of Kitty Hood's little school-room during her temporary absence. And
now what was the necessity which had for the moment withdrawn her from her
charge, and what was the provocation under which the words were uttered,
given at the commencement of this chapter?
Perhaps the personal appearance of Dick Compton may go at least a little
distance towards the explanation. As he stood kicking his foot against the
lower step of the school-house door and listening to the words of petulance
which his mistress so plentifully bestowed upon him, it was to be seen that
while his coat was a sack of ordinary light summer-stuff, looking civil and
homelike enough, his pants and cap were both gray and military, according
to the pattern of the Reserves. Under his arm he held a bundle which might
very easily have contained the coat necessary to make the uniform complete;
and such was, indeed, the composition of the parcel. Dick Compton, never
before connected with any military organization, had the night before
determined to abandon home and the girl he loved, leave other hands to
gather in the fast ripening harvest, intrust his favorite pair of
farm-horses to the care of his younger brother and the hands on the farm,
and make at least a small part of the response to the urgent call of
Governor Curtin. He had been down to the rendezvous, to sign the roll of
membership in the Reserves, and to get his uniform, that morning. He was to
leave with the regiment for Harrisburgh, that evening, and it was on his
way home to the pleasant farm-house lying a couple of miles northward and
across the main road leading up from Market street, that he had called at
the school-house to make his adieux to Kitty Hood, which seemed to be so
ungraciously received.
They were so indeed. Kitty, from the moment when Compton tapped at the door
and called her out amid the surprised glances and then the tittering of the
school-children--from the moment when she had observed his military cap and
pants--had understood the whole story and put herself not only on her
dignity but her unamiability. She had not smiled even once upon him, or
allowed him to take her hand, though he reached out for it; and though the
jolly round face of the school-mistress was not by any means the pattern of
countenance that could be made stupendously awful by the greatest amount
of effort, yet Kitty had done her best to be royal--not to say imperial. To
his explanations she had been worse than the traditional
"deaf"--insultingly interrupting; and to his asseverations that the country
needed the heart and the arm of every true man, she had answered with that
unromantic but unanswerable word: "fiddlestick!" She had tried wheedling,
coaxing, scolding, every thing but crying, in the effort to make him forego
his resolution and take off his name (supposing that he could do such a
thing) from the roll of the Reserves. She had no doubt, and expressed
herself to that effect, that if he went to Harrisburgh he would come back
in a coffin, all cut up into little bits by the savages, or not come back
at all and have his skull and bones used for a drinking cup and a few
necklaces by the women of Secessia, or come back in a condition worse than
either, with both legs cut off close up to the body, one arm gone and his
skull broken in, and a pretty thing for a respectable young woman to marry!
It was very well, for the sake of his adherence to his patriotic purpose,
that Dick Compton had in him that dash of bull-dog tenacity to which
allusion has before been made; for it is not every man to whom such words
of spiteful prophesy and determined discouragement, coming from the lips of
a pretty woman who made her own love the excuse for uttering them, would
have been without their effect. They might as well have been uttered to one
of the granite gods of old, as to Compton, so far as moving him to any
change of purpose was concerned; but his temper was by no means of as good
proof as his determination. In fact, Kitty Hood's spiteful expostulations
very soon made him ill-natured if not angry; and by the time the
culmination already recorded was reached, he was quite ready to say, in a
tone corresponding to her own:
"Well, I _will_ go, Kitty Hood, whether you like it or not. I was a fool
not to go away without walking a mile further to let you know any thing
about it."
"Nobody asked you!" was the petulant reply.
"Nobody _need_ to ask me, next time!" was the rejoinder. "I have a right to
be killed, if I please, and it is none of your business whether I am or
not. A pretty world it would be, with half of it made up of women too weak
and too cowardly to fight a cat, and the other half of men tied fast of
their apron strings, so that they had to ask every time they wanted to go
away, just as one of your little whelps of school-boys whines: 'Please to
let me go out!'"
Kitty Hood was finding a tongue quite as sharp as her own, by this time,
and the effect was very much what is often seen in corresponding cases.
Finding her lover growing as angry as herself, and a little more violent,
the young school-mistress concluded that it was time to assume a less
decided demeanor, so that if they must part they might do so without an
absolute quarrel.
"Well, Dick," she said, after a moment of pause, "there is no use of your
being angry about it!" Just as if she had not been showing ill-temper from
the beginning--the minx! "Of course I cannot hold you, and do not wish to
do so, if you prefer dressing yourself up in that ridiculous manner and
standing up to be shot at, to remaining here with _me_."
"I don't _prefer_ it, you know I don't, Kitty!" said Dick, aware that his
flank of conversation had once more been turned and himself placed in a
false position.
But here came an interruption. A young gentleman of seven made his
appearance in the door of the school-room, his hands blacker than the
proverbial ace-of-spades, his nether raiments spotted, and his face drawn
into a most comical whimper, while his words came out between a sob and a
hiccough:
"Please, Miss Hood, won't you come in to Jem Stephenson? He has gone and
upsot the inkstand all over my hands and spoilt my new trowsers!"
"Go in and keep your seat, you young villain, or I shall flog you and Jem
Stephenson both!" was the consoling assurance with which the "young
villain" departed; while the hum from the school-room was evidently
increasing, and the young school-mistress felt that she must indeed soon
resume the reins of government if she was not to be permanently left
without a realm worth ruling. But she took time to rejoin to Compton's last
assertion.
"I don't know any thing of the kind. I say that if you thought half as much
of me as you did of public opinion and making a show of your fine new
clothes, you would not stir one step."
"Now, Kitty, do be reasonable--" again began Compton.
"Look at other people--don't _they_ respect the wishes of those they expect
to marry?" the young lady went on, not heeding his last attempt.
"See--there is Carlton Brand--who does not know that he has remained at
home ever since the war broke out, though he could have been a Colonel and
perhaps even a General--just because he was really in love with Margaret
Hayley, and she did not wish him to leave her?"
It is scarcely necessary to say, at this stage of the narration, that Miss
Kitty Hood was "begging the question." She had never heard one word to
indicate why Carlton Brand had not accepted his opportunities, and she
merely mentioned the two as people of prominence in the section,
acquaintances, and the first pair of lovers of whom she happened to think.
But she had made a terrible blunder, as many of us do at the very moment
when we seem to be performing the very keenest of operations. Carlton
Brand--one of the finest-looking men to be found within a radius of an
hundred miles, a member of one of the liberal professions, and known to be
wealthy enough to afford indulgence in any line of life which he might
happen to fancy--was naturally an object of envy if not of suspicion to
hundreds of other young men who did not feel that they possessed quite the
same advantages. Young farmers, who chanced to catch him saying a polite
word to their sisters, looked at him through eyes not too confiding, in
spite of the fact that not even rumor had pointed out a single instance in
which he had indulged in a dishonorable amour; and those who detected him
in glances of kindness (perhaps of admiration) towards demoiselles whom
they had marked out as their own destined marital property, had a bad habit
of even looking out of the corners of their eyes and scowling a little, at
such manifestations. Carlton Brand, in all this, was only paying a very
slight penalty for his triple advantage of wealth, position and good looks,
while many others pay the same unpleasant toll to society for the
possession of even one (and sometimes none) of the three favors of fortune.
The farm-house of the Comptons and the residence of the Brands (as will be
hereafter made apparent) lay but a very short distance apart; and the
little house (perhaps it might with more propriety have been called a
cottage) in which Kitty Hood had seen the light, and where she lived with
her quiet widowed mother, was still nearer to the abode of the young
lawyer. Though the Hoods were much more humbly circumstanced than their
neighbors, intercourse between the two families had always been frequent,
with a very pleasant friendship between Elsie and Kitty, and more visits of
the young girl at the residence of the Brands, and of Carlton, accompanying
his sister, to that of the Hoods, than at all pleased the lover and
expectant husband of Kitty. Then the latter had a head a little giddy and a
tongue more than a little imprudent; and she had shown the bad taste, many
times since their tacit engagement, to draw comparisons, in the presence of
her lover, to his disadvantage, and in favor of a man who had much better
opportunities than the farmer for keeping his clothes unimpeachable, his
hands unsoiled, and his cheek unbrowned. Only very imprudent people, and
perhaps very unfeeling ones, use such words; but they are used much too
often, ignoring the pure gold that may lie within a rough nugget, and
preferring the mere tinsel leaf on a bit of handsome carving. Kitty Hood
was one of the thoughtless, and she was likely, some day, to pay the
penalty in a manner she little anticipated.
Within the few weeks previous, without Kitty being at all aware of the
fact, Mr. Dick Compton had allowed himself to ruminate more than was
healthy upon the glances he had chanced to see interchanged between Kitty
and her "stuck-up lawyer friend," as he chose to designate him, and upon
the continual commendations which she chose to bestow on the latter--until
rooted personal dislike and something very near to positive jealousy, had
been the result. Walking over towards the rendezvous that morning, if one
shadow of hesitation on the subject of going to Harrisburgh had passed
through the mind of the young farmer, it was caused by his dislike of
leaving Kitty out of view, with Carlton Brand in the same near
neighborhood. All that difficulty had been removed by the understanding
that the lawyer was to leave at the same time and on the same service with
himself; but when Kitty at once revived the obnoxious name with a new
phrase of commendation, and signified that the section was not to be
relieved of the lawyer's presence during his own absence, it is not very
strange that the unreasonable demons of jealousy began tugging again at his
heart-strings, and that he felt like performing some severe operation upon
the Mordecai who sat in his gate, if he could only catch him!
"So you have got to quoting Carlton Brand again, have you!" he responded to
Miss Kitty's citation. "I thought I had told before that I had heard nearly
enough of that proud puppy!"
"'Puppy' indeed!" and Miss Kitty fired in an instant. "He's nothing of the
kind, but a man and a gentleman, and you know it, Dick Compton!"
"Oh, yes, a _gentleman_, and that suits you to a turn, Kitty Hood!" was the
sneering reply. "When your _gentlemen_ are in the way, you think that an
honest hard-working man is nobody."
If ever a man spoke an unjust word to a woman (and it is to be feared that
a great many have been uttered since the unfortunate gift of speech was
conferred upon the race), Dick Compton was stupidly unjust at that moment.
For the very quarrel (it was but little else, from first to last) in which
they were engaged, had originated in the young girl's evident anxiety for
his safety and pleading that he would not go away and leave her, even for a
short period! Kitty Hood felt the injustice, if he did not, and all the old
rage came back again, in a varied form, but hotter than ever. Her eyes
flashed, she choked for a moment, and then, before Dick Compton could be at
all aware what was about to happen, the school-mistress drew her little
white hand back and brought him a ringing box on the ear and cheek, that
the latter would not be very likely to forget for a fortnight,--while she
flashed out:
"Dick Compton, just take that for a fool! You are not worth any honest
woman's loving, with your mean jealousy. You can go where you please, and I
will never speak to you again until you learn better manners than to talk
to _me_ in that manner!"
Before the jealous lover had half recovered from the blow she stepped away
from him and put her foot on the sill of the door, to re-enter. Compton,
spite of the tingle in his cheek, did not quite believe in the propriety of
parting in that manner, when he was just going to the war; and he made a
step towards her.
"Kitty!--oh, now, Kitty--"
"Keep off, Dick Compton! Good-day and good-bye, and nobody cares where you
go or how long you stay!" was the forbidding rejoinder, as the
school-mistress swung herself round the jamb of the door and half
disappeared. Her blood was at fever heat: that of her lover was likely to
be at the same pitch in a moment.
"You won't come back, then?"
"No, I won't!"
"Then I will tell you something, Kitty Hood!" and the young man was very
angry and very earnest when he made the threat. "If I can catch Carlton
Brand before I go away to-night, I will just flog him till he is the
nearest to a dead man _you_ ever saw,--and see how you both like it!"
Without another word the young farmer turned and strode round the corner of
the school-house with his bundle and his indignation, making hasty strides
up the hill and towards the woods that lay in the direction of his home.
Kitty Hood saw thus much, and realized that very probably she was looking
at him for the last time. Then she realized, too, what she had scarcely
felt before--that she had been terribly to blame in the quarrel--that she
might have been wrecking the happiness of a life by her ill-temper--and
that it would never do to let poor Dick go away to the war, so angry at her
that if killed his last thought would be upon every one else rather than
her, and that if he returned he would never come near her again--never!
Then poor Kitty dropped her head upon her desk, heedless of the only
partially-hushed Pandemonium around her and the necessity of settling with
Master Jem Stephenson, spiller of ink and others,--dropped her head upon
her desk and sobbed loudly enough for some of the children to be quite
aware of the fact, so that one of the little boys hazarded the remark,
_sotto voce_: "Wonder what is the matter with her!" and a bigger one
enlightened his ignorance with: "Why, didn't you see? Her beau has got on
sojer clothes and is going away--stupid!"
Only a minute or two, and then Kitty Hood could endure the struggle no
longer. She was very unhappy and not a little penitent. She _could_ not
remain any longer in the midst of those noisy children: she _must_ go home
(or elsewhere) and see what facilities fate might yet throw in her way for
seeing and speaking once more to her angry lover before his departure.
Perhaps she could even find some means, still, for inducing him to remain,
and then----. And at that thought the school-mistress raised her head,
informed her school that she had a bad headache and must go home to bed,
and dismissed them for a half-holiday.
Whereupon one of the larger girls, who had seen the lover go away, without
hearing any of the parting words, and who thought that she understood all
about the affair, remarked to one of her companions that: "That was real
nice, and she thought all the better of Miss Hood for it!" while one of the
larger boys, unawake as yet to any of the softer feelings, bawled out to
his mates that: "Miss Hood was going to see her old beau off--ki-yah!" It
is painful to be obliged to say, justifying previously-expressed
apprehension, that even the stranded vessel was forgotten in the haste with
which the school separated, and that all the imaginary pirates of the
Society, the Friendly and various other islands that maintained every thing
else rather than friendly society for sailors, had at least one day more of
chance at her with their canoes and pirogues.
Her scholars dismissed, Kitty Hood took time to wash and cool her eyes and
to smooth her hair, for a moment, at the little wash-closet in one corner
of the school-room--then flung on her light bonnet and gauzy mantle and
took her way, walking somewhat rapidly in spite of the heat of the coming
noon, along the path that led around the base of the hill north-westward
towards the residence of Carlton and Elsie Brand.
Mr. Richard Compton had meanwhile been walking yet more rapidly, with his
bundle under his arm, up the path leading over the hill, almost due north,
and through the belt of woods discernible from the school-house. Whether
the increasing heat of the day added to the heat of his temper is
uncertain; but certain it is that he did not at all cool down under it. He
had the excuse of being the party _last_ ill-used, if not indeed the party
_first_ so treated. He loved Kitty Hood beyond all reason, and he was of
course the person most likely to grow angry at her and jealous of her,
beyond all endurance. He felt that he could not worse punish her, or better
satisfy himself, than by carrying out his threat and soundly flogging
Carlton Brand if he should once catch him under proper circumstances; he
had no doubt whatever of his ability to flog him or "any other man," when
he once set about the task; and while surmounting the hill, and even after
plunging into the cool, thick, leafy woods, full of the twitter of birds
and the fragrance of June blossoms, which should have had the power to
soften passion in the breast of any man who held a true sympathy with
Nature, his mental fists were clenched and his teeth set in a manner most
threatening for any opposing force with which he might happen to be brought
into contact.
That "opposing force" was much nearer than the young man at the moment
imagined. He was just emerging by the path to the main road which he was to
cross, half a mile before reaching his own farm, when he saw a horseman
riding rapidly up from the eastward. Intersecting the path just where it
joined the road, was a blind road leading through the woods across toward
the Darby, and closed at the entrance by a swinging gate. There was a low
panel near it, and the young farmer leaped it in preference to unfastening
the clumsy latch--finding himself, when beyond the fence, in the presence
of Carlton Brand, who had just reined in his horse at the gate. Whatever
there may have been in the face of the horseman at that moment, within a
few minutes after his leaving the presence of Margaret Hayley and his
sister, the eyes of Dick Compton were not sufficiently keen to recognize
it. He only saw the handsome, proud-looking young lawyer, and his old
antipathy rose, with the remembrance of the threat he had just used,
accompanying it. Carlton Brand saw nothing more in the face of the young
farmer than he had been accustomed to see, and accosted him as he might
have done any other acquaintance, under the same circumstances, with a
request for a slight service.
"Ah, Compton, is that you?--just be kind enough to throw open that gate for
me, will you?"
"No--I'll not do any thing of the kind. If you want the gate open, just
get off and open it yourself!" was the surly reply, very much to the
astonishment of the lawyer. His face paled a little, then flushed, and he
hesitated for an instant before he asked:
"What do you mean, Richard Compton, by answering me in that manner?"
"What I say!" answered Compton, quite as insolently as before. "You are a
puppy, Carlton Brand, and I have half a mind to take you off that horse and
flog you soundly, instead of opening a gate for you."
"The d----l you have!" was the very natural reply. "Well, Dick Compton, I
do not know what it is all about, but you are behaving very much like a
ruffian, to a man who has never done any thing worse to you than to treat
you like a gentleman."
"You lie, Carlton Brand, and you know it!" was the response.
"I lie, do I?" and the speaker shifted a little uneasily in his saddle,
though he made no apparent movement to alight.
"Yes, you lie!" said Compton, his voice thick and hoarse with agitation and
anger. "And if you will get off that horse I will teach you a lesson about
meddling with other people's property, that you will remember for a
twelvemonth."
If Carlton Brand's face expressed intense surprise, it was certainly
nothing more than he felt; for what the "meddling with other people's
property" could mean, except that he might unwittingly have run across some
interest of Compton's in the pursuit of his profession, he had no more idea
than he could have had of the number of trees in the adjoining wood or the
depth of soil on which his horse was standing. Yet he threw his leg at once
over the saddle, at the last salutation, sprang to the ground, flung his
bridle over one of the posts near the gate, and said:
"Now then!"
In an instant and without another word, Dick Compton, who had dropped his
bundle as the other dismounted, sprang at him, fury in his face and the
clench of determined hostility in every nerve. Probably no battle on earth
was ever fought so singularly--the one combatant without the least cause
for his rage, and the other not even acquainted with the accusation made
against him. They seemed not badly matched, in physical force, though any
connoisseur of the exclusively muscular would have considered Compton
likely to be by far the most enduring. He was fifteen or twenty pounds the
heavier, and fully trained by field labor; Brand two or three inches the
taller, athletic, and a little the longer armed.
Half a dozen blows were rapidly exchanged, before either succeeded in
breaking the guard of the other. Then Compton managed to reach the lawyer's
cheek, with a blow of some violence that probably stung within quite as
much as it did without. At all events it brought a new color to his face,
and from that instant he was cool no longer. He struck out more rapidly and
angrily, and Compton followed his motion. In less than a minute half a
dozen blows had reached the faces and bodies of each, and there was a
probability that, whatever the event of the fight, both would be injured as
well as disfigured. Suddenly, the instant after, as Compton aimed a
well-directed blow at the throat of his antagonist, that he believed would
entirely settle the affair, something happened, upon which he had not
calculated. Whether his blow was entirely fended he did not know; but what
he did know, so far as he knew any thing, was that Carlton Brand's right
fist, dashed out with a force little less formidable than the kick of an
iron-shod horse, struck him on the left of the nose and the cheek
adjoining, sending a perfect gore of blood spouting over face and clothing,
and throwing him reeling backward, stunned and half senseless, to the
earth,--the fight over, so far as he was to bear any part in it.
There was only a little sensation left in poor Compton at that juncture,
but that little cried out against being beaten down in such a manner by a
man whom he had before considered his inferior in muscular power, and whom
he had set out to flog. The bull-dog within him wished to rise and make
another effort, but for a moment his eyes _would not_ open and his head
would not clear sufficiently for him to make any effort at regaining his
lost perpendicular. When he thought he heard a groan and a loud "thud" on
the ground, and he did manage to struggle to a sitting position, the sight
that met his eyes was nearly sufficient to drive him back into his partial
insensibility, amazement and horror being about equally compounded in the
spectacle. Carlton Brand lay at length on the ground, his face set in a
frightful spasm, a thin white froth issuing from the set lips, the eyes
closed, and not even a quiver of motion in the limbs. Dick Compton sprang
up, then, with a supernatural energy born of absolute fright, and bent over
his prostrate antagonist. To all appearance he was dead!--dead as if he had
been lying there for the last century! The frightened farmer put his hand
to his temples, his pulses and his heart, and found no motion whatever.
Then the dreadful fear took possession of him that his own last blow, which
he remembered aiming at the throat of the other, might have taken effect
there at the same moment when he was himself struck and prostrated--that
some vital part of the throat might have been touched and death instantly
ensued!
To say that Dick Compton was frightened and even horrified at this
unexpected issue of the pugilistic combat which he had forced, is indeed to
put the case very mildly. He was literally paralyzed, for the moment, with
consternation. What was his fate?--to be a homicide! And--good God!--here
another thought took possession of him. He had left Kitty Hood at the
school-house, only a little while before, himself angry and in a dangerous
mood, and with his last words threatening personal violence against Carlton
Brand! If he should be dead--and there seemed to be no hope to the
contrary--what words of his could ever persuade the school-mistress that he
had not entertained enough of jealousy and anger against the lawyer to
desire his death?--and how far would not Kitty's evidence go in proving
before a criminal court that he was an intentional murderer?
Such reflections are not pleasant, to say the least! A very few of them go
a great way in a man's life. Those who have been placed, even for one
moment, in the belief that they have suddenly become homicides, need not be
told how far beyond all other horrors is the feeling: those who have missed
the sensation, may thank God with all reverence for having spared them one
of the untold agonies which belong only to the damned!
Dick Compton was not one of the most delicate of men, either in action or
perception, but he was a good fellow in the main, with quite enough of
intuition to foresee the worst perils of a situation, and with quite enough
of presence of mind to act quickly in a desperate emergency. There was yet
no breath or motion in the prostrate man: he would die very soon if not
already dead: something might yet be done for him: but that something, if
done at all, must be done at once. Besides, if death should prove to be
real, he would himself be a little better circumstanced if found trying to
preserve the life of his antagonist, than if discovered to have let him die
without effort. A mile to the westward, and at the side of the very road at
the edge of which he was standing, was the residence of one of the two
doctors of the immediate section, and medical assistance might be procured,
with the aid of the fallen man's horse, in a brief period.
With this thought in mind, and in far less time after the occurrence of the
catastrophe than it has needed to put it upon record, Dick Compton had
unfastened the horse of Carlton Brand from the post, swung himself into the
saddle, and was galloping away westward, a little doubtful in mind whether
he was indeed going after a doctor or looking for a convenient gallows and
a hangman,--and wishing, from the bottom of his soul, that he had never
entertained quite so good an opinion of his personal prowess as that which
had led him into such a terrible position. Once, as he galloped on, he
caught sight of his new military trowsers, and found himself thinking
whether, when they hung soldiers, they allowed them to retain their uniform
or subjected them to the degrading alternative of the prison gray! And that
is all, of the very peculiar reflections of Mr. Dick Compton as he sped
away after the doctor, that needs to be put upon record.
Kitty Hood, meanwhile, leaving the school-house perhaps ten minutes after
her lover, had sped along the path at the base of the woods, intent on
going over to the residence of the Brands and seeking advice, if not
assistance, from Elsie, in her dilemma. She had quite overcome her anger,
now, and taken into her young heart a full supply of that which very often
follows the former--anxiety; and her feet moved as glibly, in the better
cause of reconciliation, as her tongue had done not long before in a very
unreasonable lovers' quarrel.
The path she was pursuing would have led her out to the main road, which
she must cross to reach the Brands', some half a mile further west than the
point at which the gate gave access to the blind road through the wood. But
there was a little spot of marshy ground before reaching the road; she
remembered that her shoes were thin and that wet feet were disagreeable
even in June, and as a consequence she struck into a cross path which
intersected the blind road and would bring her out at the gate. As a
secondary consequence, she followed that road and came out a minute after
at the gate, to open it without observing what lay beyond, and to start
back with a scream of affright as she saw the body of Carlton Brand lying
on the green sward without, his face still set in that terrible contortion,
and the rigidity of death alike in limb and feature.
The young girl had seen but little of death, and not yet learned to regard
it rather as a deliverance than otherwise; and in any shape it frightened
her. How natural, then, that she should regard it with peculiar horror when
she came upon it alone, by a wood-side, and in the person of an
acquaintance equally admired and respected! But what must have been her
feelings when, the moment after, and before she had commanded herself
sufficiently to do more than utter that single scream of terror, she saw a
bundle lying near the apparently dead man, saw blood staining one of his
hands and the grass beside him, and recognized the bundle as the same she
had seen, not half an hour before, under the arm of Richard Compton!
If that unfortunate young man, on discovering the supposed extent of his
mishap, had remembered the threat against the lawyer made but a little
while before to Kitty, how did that threat spring into her mind on seeing
the blood and recognizing the bundle! Murder, beyond a doubt, and Dick
Compton the murderer! The two had met, accidentally, had quarrelled, had
clenched, and in that clench her lover had forgotten all except his
jealousy and fear of the lawyer, and had killed him outright! Oh, here was
trouble, indeed, to which that of a few moments previous had been but the
merest shadow! Dick would be arrested, tried, imprisoned, perhaps hung; and
_she_ would be obliged to give the fatal evidence that must seal his doom!
Terrible indeed--most terrible!--the thought culminating in such mental
suffering that the poor girl scarcely knew whether she was treading upon
earth or air, as she took one more look upon the motionless form, the
blood, and the accusing bundle that lay beside--then turned her back with a
shudder upon all, crossed the road and hastened over the fields beyond, by
a bye-path that would lead her to the home of the murdered man--her errand
now, and her reason for haste, how different from what it had been when
walking towards, the same destination but a few moments before!
CHAPTER IV.
THE RESIDENCE OF THE BRANDS--ROBERT BRAND AND DR. PHILIP
POMEROY--RADICAL AND COPPERHEAD--A PASSAGE-AT-ARMS THAT
ENDED IN A QUARREL--ELSPETH GRAEME THE HOUSEKEEPER--THE
SHADOW OF SHAME--FATHER AND DAUGHTER--THE FALLING OF A
PARENT'S CURSE.
Half a mile northward from the Market street road which has already been
before so many times alluded to--on the north side of that road and at the
distance of a mile westward from the Hayley residence, was located that
before mentioned as the abode of the Brands. It was a fine old house, built
fifty or sixty years before, but within a few years repaired and rebuilt
with a lavish disregard of cost, a railed promenade having been added at
the apex of the steep roof, the whole two stories of height re-enclosed,
the windows and doors comparatively modernized, the piazzas remodelled and
widened, and all done that the carpenter's art could well be expected to
achieve, to add to the comfort and durability of the mansion without
destroying the appearance of respectable age which it had already put on.
The house stood facing southward upon nearly level ground, the lawn in
front of good depth and thickly dotted with forest and other shade trees
that had evidently known all the years of the building; while from the
eastern side a narrow lane ran down to the road and afforded ingress and
egress to carriages passing back towards the handsomely-grouped range of
outbuildings in the rear. Adjoining this lane and behind the house was a
large garden, with grape trellises and many of the appliances of luxury in
horticulture.
At the eastern end of the piazza a broad single door opened into the
somewhat antiquated hall; and from that hall a door opened into a parlor
fitted up with every appliance of convenience that could be needed in such
a country residence. Behind that parlor another door opened into a smaller
apartment correspondingly fitted but with more of those belongings
calculated to show its constant occupancy; and from that rear room still
another door opening to the left disclosed a bed-room of comfortable
appearance and tasteful arrangement. On the other side of the hall the
dining and domestic apartments stretched away, while the spacious upper
story supplied rooms to other members of the family.
It was very evident, at a glance, that wealth presided over the modernized
old house, and that good taste was not forgotten; and yet an impression
could not well be avoided that there must be something of severity, and
repugnance to ornament, conjoined with the wealth. Poverty, or even
struggling pride, would not have afforded so much of the best: warm taste
and lavish liberality would have supplied something more of the costly and
the luxurious.
In the second of the rooms mentioned--that immediately in the rear of the
parlor, two persons were in conversation at about noon of the same day of
the occurrences previously recorded. The one, sitting in an easy-chair with
his right leg raised and resting upon another chair crowned with a
pillow,--was apparently sixty-five to seventy years of age; tall, if his
proportions could properly be judged as he sat, with a figure that must
have been robust in its time; the hair so nearly white as to preclude any
idea of the color which it might have worn in earlier days; the face well
cut and even handsome for its age, though with a shade of severity in the
firm nose and shaven lips, which under some circumstances might grow
threatening; but any accurate judgment of his character rendered difficult,
by the look of pain stamped upon his face by evident bodily suffering.
Resting against a small table partially covered with bandages and
embrocations, was a stout cane, indicating both that the invalid was in the
habit of using a support of that character, and that he could not, even
now, be entirely confined to his chair. Such was Robert Brand, owner of
the mansion into which we have been introduced, and father of two children
apparently as little alike in nature as in sex--Carlton and Elsie Brand.
The second figure was quite as well deserving of notice as the old man in
his easy-chair. Doctor Philip Pomeroy, who was at that moment pacing up and
down the room without any apparent cause for that violent exercise in warm
weather, was a man in whom the acute physiognomist might have found
something illustrated by that seemingly listless motion--something
possessed in common by restless men, in the superior animal kingdom, and
those bears and hyenas which seem to traverse a great many unnecessary
miles in travelling up and down the bars of their cages, in the inferior.
And yet the doctor could not have been called, with any propriety, an
"animal-looking man"--it was the motion which supplied the comparison. He
was apparently forty-five to fifty, tall and slight figured, with face
clean shaven except a heavy dark moustache, features a little aquiline and
decidedly sharp lips that suggested an occasional sneer and a word cutting
like a scimetar, eyes of keen scintillant dark brown or black, and rather
long dark straight hair through which the threads of silver began to show
more as an ornament than a disadvantage. A very fine looking man--a man of
undoubted power and will--a man who had evidently enjoyed the most
favorable associations; and yet how nearly a man to be either braved or
trusted without reserve, it might have needed Lavater's self to decide on a
brief acquaintance. That same Lavater, if acquainted with the peculiarities
of road turn-outs, would have decided one point, at least, from the vehicle
that stood in the lane, near the door--no clumsy and cumbersome gig,
weighing an indefinite number of tons and set down as the proper conveyance
for doctors from the day when the first one grew too lazy to walk,--but a
light, sporting-looking buggy, seated for one, and suggesting fast driving
quite as much as the high-blooded, thorough-bred bay that champed his bit
before it and stamped impatiently for the coming of his master.
From the medical character of the visitor and the disabled appearance of
the man in the easy-chair, it might have been concluded that the call was a
professional one; and such was indeed the fact. An injury to the right limb
of Robert Brand, received many years before, had a habit of asserting
itself at uncertain periods, crippling him materially all the while, and at
those particular times throwing him into all those agonies indifferently
known as the pangs of neuralgia and inflammatory rheumatism. At such
periods, the traditional character of the "gouty old Admiral" of the
English stage, always limping and thumping a heavy cane, and nearly always
venting words more forcible than polite, was very nearly illustrated in the
old gentleman, his desire for active motion being generally in an inverse
ratio to the power of movement. Dr. Pomeroy, one of the most skilful of the
physicians of the section, and a man in very extensive practice, was always
his medical adviser at such times, and re-directed the application of those
warm flannels and neutralizing embrocations which constituted all that even
science could do for the alleviation of his sufferings, and about which old
Elspeth the housekeeper knew a good deal more, all the while, than any
physician could possibly do. For the three days previous, Robert Brand had
been suffering to a most painful degree, and this was the third of the
daily visits of the doctor.
But whatever might have been the professional character of the visit, it
had, before the moment when our attention is called to the two
interlocutors, lost any feature which could have marked it as such. Robert
Brand was a patriot, almost equally warm-hearted and hot-headed in the type
of his attachment to his country; while Dr. Pomeroy was one of those
quasi-loyalists, popularly called "Copperheads," who have the love of
country quite as often on their lips as the most unshrinking war-advocate
can do, but who prefer to show that love by objecting to every effort made
for the preservation of nationality, by denouncing, in every nine words out
of ten, something done by the loyal government, while only the poor tenth
is kept for a wail over the unfortunate character of the "civil war,"--and
by undervaluing every success won by the Union arms, while every momentary
advantage gained by the rebels is correspondingly magnified. He seemed to
take particular delight, always, in tormenting the old gentleman just to
the verge of a positive rupture without quite causing one; and just now, in
the advance of the rebel forces into Pennsylvania, he found a golden
opportunity.
"Bah!" he said, in response to a strongly patriotic expression of his
patron, which had led him to bring down one of his hands upon the disabled
leg with a force causing a new tingle in that limb and a new expression of
agony upon his face--"bah! All you hot-headed people, young and old, use
just such language, all the while. It amounts to nothing, except that
perhaps it eases your minds. Saying that 'the Union must and shall be
preserved,' and prophesying all kinds of good things for the nation, amount
to but very little while a set of incapables sit filling their pockets at
Washington (more than half of them traitors, in my opinion), while the army
is worse mismanaged than it could be if a set of school-boys led it, and
while the enemies you affect to despise are really winning every thing and
overrunning the whole country."
"Out upon you, Dr. Pomeroy!" cried the old man, angrily. "You dare to call
yourself a patriot, and talk in that manner! There are plenty of fools at
Washington, but I would rather see fools there than traitors! If you are
not a perfect block-head, you know that the rebels have lost twice as much
as they have gained, within the past year, and that if the fight goes on in
the same manner for one year more, the miserable mongrel concern will die
of its own weakness! But you do not _want_ it to die--that is just what
ails _you_!--you would rather see Jeff Davis in the Capitol than any loyal
man who would not give all the offices to your miserable broken-down
party!"
"And you would rather see the whole country lying in ruins, with heaps of
dead everywhere and the few who remain starving to death in the midst of
them, than that the country should be in any other hands than those of your
friends who do nothing else than talk about the nigger, legislate for the
nigger, and fight for the nigger!" answered the doctor, still continuing
his walk, and his face showing decided temper.
"It is false, and you know it, Philip Pomeroy!" said the invalid, with a
motion of his hand towards the big cane, which indicated that he would have
liked to use it by breaking it over the doctor's head.
"It is true, and _you_ know it, Robert Brand!" replied the doctor, whose
temper seemed to return to its equanimity the moment he had succeeded in
throwing his patient into a sufficient rage. "But you need not take so much
pains to conceal your opinions, old gentleman! _I_ don't! If the country is
to lie under the control of men who only legislate and fight for the
nigger, who trample upon the Constitution and fill Fort McHenry and Fort
Lafayette and Fort Warren with better men than themselves, who do not
happen to think and act precisely as _they_ do,--why, the sooner that Jeff
Davis, or any one else, gets possession, the better for all concerned."
"Doctor Pomeroy, you ought to be taken and hung, with the other traitors,
and I shouldn't much mind having a pull at the rope!" broke out the old
man, now almost entirely beside himself with indignation.
"Oh, I know that!" answered the doctor, whose temper was still visibly
improving as that of his patient grew worse. "Any of your abolition pack
would have helped to hang every democrat, long ago, if they had only
_dared_! The only trouble is that they did not do it while they had the
opportunity. Now it is too late. You daren't open the doors of your
State-prisons any more, unless it is to let somebody _out_! And before many
days some of you will sing a different tune--take my word for it. Some of
you radicals, even here at Philadelphia, will try to make the Confederate
leaders believe that you have been the truest friends of the South, all the
while."
"What do you mean, you scoundrel?" asked the old gentleman, whose harsh
words to a man somewhat younger than himself appeared to be fully
understood and not taken in quite the sense which they might have borne to
other ears.
"I mean that Lee will take Harrisburgh, and that next he will take
Philadelphia; then--"
"Take Purgatory! He can never take Harrisburgh, let alone Philadelphia!"
"He can and will take it! What is to hinder him?"
"Just what has hindered his taking Washington, any time the last two
years--better troops than his own, and more of them."
"Sheep before butchers'-dogs! The men of the North have never gone into the
war at all, and they never will go. That scum which you call an army cannot
fight the earnest and determined men of the South, and you ought to know
it. Within a week Lee will be in Philadelphia, and then we will see about
the change of tune!"
"Within a week, if he dares advance, he will be eaten up by the State
militia alone, even if the Army of the Potomac does not save them the
trouble!" said the old man.
"The Army of the Potomac has been good for nothing ever since Hooker
blundered its last opportunity away at Chancellorsville!" retorted the
physician. "The army has no confidence in _him_, and the country has no
confidence either in him or the army. The State militia will vigorously
stay at home, or they will behave so badly after they go out, that they had
much better kept where nobody saw them! Oh, by the way!--" and the face of
the doctor lit up with a new expression. A sneer settled itself upon his
well-formed lips, and there came into his scintillant eyes a gleam of
deadly dislike which boded no good to the subject of which he was about to
speak. He might have been only half in earnest, before, while driving the
old man wild with his Copperhead banter; but he was certainly interested in
what he was about to say, now!
"Well?" asked the patient, querulously, as he saw that some new topic was
to interlard that which had already been so unpleasant.
"That State militia you were talking about," said the doctor. "Your son was
expected to take up his old commission and go out with one of the
regiments, was he not?"
"He was not only expected to do so, but he has done so!" answered the
father, with love and pride in his eyes. "Not all the people in the country
are either Copperheads or cowards, doctor; and I am proud to tell you that
if _I_ am too old and too much crippled to take part in the battles of my
country, or even to get up and break my cane over your head when you insult
the very name of patriotism,--I have a son who when his opportunity comes
can do the one and will do the other!"
"When his 'opportunity' comes!" echoed the doctor, sneeringly.
"Yes, his opportunity!" re-echoed the father, who felt that there was
something invidious in the tone, though he could not read that face which
might have given him a better clue to the character of the man with whom he
was dealing. "My son has been too much hampered with business before, to
accept any of the chances which have been offered him; but now that his
native State is invaded, business is thrown by and you will find him, sir,
keeping up the honor of the name."
"Humph!" said the doctor, pausing in his walk and for some unexplainable
reason going to the window and looking out; so that he stood with his back
to the old gentleman. "Where is your son, now?"
"Where? Gone down to the rendezvous to take his commission, of course, as I
understand that the troops will leave to-night."
"Humph!" once more said the doctor, in the same insolent tone and retaining
his position at the window. "And yet I happen to know that your son has
discovered some new '_business_,' (with a terribly significant emphasis on
the last word) and that he is not going one step with the regiment."
"Dr. Pomeroy, I know better!" was the reply.
"Mr. Brand, I know what I am talking about, a good deal better than you
imagine!" sneered the doctor, who having by that time managed to get his
face into that shape which he had no objection to being seen by his
patient, now turned about and faced him, with his hands under the tails of
his coat.
"_What_ do you know?" was the inquiry, a little trouble blending with the
anxiety in the face.
"Well, I will tell you, as perhaps you may as well learn the fact from me
as from any one else," answered the doctor, his tones now very smooth, and
his manner almost deferential, as should be the demeanor of any man towards
his victim at the moment of stabbing him under the fifth rib. "I had
occasion to call at the armory of the Reserves, an hour or two ago, to set
the broken arm of one of the fellows who had taken too much Monongahela in
anticipation of his start, and fallen down-stairs. I learned there and
then, with some surprise and not a little grief (the father ought to have
caught the expression of his face at that moment, and thereby measured the
"grief" indicated!) that Mr. Carlton Brand had been down at the armory,
alleged his _business_ to be such that he could not possibly leave the
city, and declined any further connection whatever with the regiment."
"It is impossible!" said the father.
"It is true, however, like a good many impossible things!" again sneered
the physician. "And I have been thinking whether some others of members of
the State militia would not be found like your amiable son--too _busy_ to
pay any attention to the defence of the State!"
"Dr. Pomeroy!" said the father, after one moment of almost stupefied
silence. "Dr. Pomeroy, you have not been friends with my son for a long
time, and I know it, though I do not know what could have caused any
disagreement. But I do not suppose you would deliberately tell a falsehood
about him that could be detected in half an hour; and I want to know what
there is hidden in your words, more than you have chosen to convey."
"You had better ask your son when he comes!" was the reply.
"No--I ask _you, now_, and I think you had better answer me!" said the old
man.
"Well, then," answered the doctor, "if you insist upon it, my love for the
young man is not so warm as to give me a great deal of pain in the telling,
and you may know all you wish. Your son has been doubted a little, ever
since the breaking out of the war, from his repeated refusals of positions
in the army; and--"
"The man who says that my son is disloyal, lies!" cried the old man,
interrupting him. "You, or any other man!"
"It was not on the ground of his _disloyalty_ that he was suspected!"
sneered the doctor.
"And what ground then?" asked the father, his face and his whole manner
showing something terrible within that could be only partially suppressed.
"The ground of his _cowardice_, since you will have it!" spoke the doctor,
in such a tone of fiendish exultation as Mephistopheles may have used to
Faust, at the moment of assuring him that the last hope of happiness on
earth or pardon from heaven had been swept away in the slaughter of
Valentine and the moral murder of Marguerite. "There is not an officer in
the Reserves, who heard him refuse to join the regiment this morning, but
believes him--yes, _knows_ him, to be an arrant poltroon."
"Doctor Philip Pomeroy, you are a liar as well as a traitor and a
scoundrel! If I had two legs, and still was, as I am, old enough to be your
father, you would not leave this house without broken bones! Get out of it,
send me your bill to-morrow, or even to-day, and never let me see you set
foot in it again while I live!"
The face of the old man was fearful, at that juncture. In spite of the pain
of his disabled limb, he had grasped his cane and struggled to a standing
position, before concluding his violent words; and as he concluded, passion
overcame all prudence, and the heavy cane went by the doctor's head,
crashing through the window and taking its way out into the garden, at the
same moment when his limb gave way and he sunk back into his chair with a
groan that was almost a shriek, clutching at the bell-rope that hung near
him and nearly tearing it from its fastenings.
Dr. Pomeroy said not another word, whatever he might have felt. He had
dodged the flying cane, by not more than an inch, and such chances are not
likely to improve the temper of even the most amiable. For one instant
there was something in his face that might have threatened personal revenge
of the violence as well as the unpardonable words, in spite of the
difference of age: then the sneer crept over his face again, he stepped out
through the parlor into the hall, took his hat, and the next moment was
bowling down the lane into the road, behind his fast-trotting bay. It
seemed likely that his last professional visit to the Brands had been paid,
even if it had not yet been paid for!
The terrible appeal of the master of the house to the bell-rope at his hand
was answered the moment after by the appearance of a woman of so remarkable
an aspect as to be worthy of quite as much attention as either of the
personages who have before been called, in the same room, to the reader's
attention. Her dress was that of a housekeeper or upper servant, though the
height of her carriage and the erectness of her figure might have stamped
her as an empress. And in truth that figure did not need any such
extraordinary carriage to develop it, for, as compared with the ordinary
stature of woman, it was little else than gigantic. The man who built a
door for Elspeth Graeme, less than six feet in the clear, subjected her to
imminent danger of bringing up with a "bump" every time she entered it; and
her broad, square, bony figure showed that all the power of her frame had
not been frittered away in length. Her hands were large and masculine,
though by no means ill-shaped, and her foot had not only the tread supposed
to belong to that of the coarser sex, but very nearly its size. In face she
was broad yet still longer of feature, with hair that had been light brown
before the gray sifted itself so thickly among it as to render the color
doubtful,--with eyes of bluish gray, a strong and somewhat coarse mouth
with no contemptible approach to a moustache of light hairs bristling at
the corners,--and with complexion wrinkled and browned by the exposures of
at least sixty years, until very nearly the last trace of what had once
been youth and womanhood was worn away and forgotten. Yet there was
something very good and very kindly amid the rugged strength of the face;
and while little children might at the first glance have feared the old
woman and run away from her as a "witch," they would at the second
certainly have crept back to her knees and depended upon a protection which
they were certain to receive.
It is only necessary, to say, in addition, that she was Scottish by birth
as well as by blood and name--that she had come to this country nearly
forty years before, when Robert Brand was a young man, and attached herself
to the fortunes of the family because they were Scottish by blood and she
was the very incarnation of faithful feudality--that his daughter had been
named Elspeth (since softened to Elsie) at her earnest desire, because she
said the name was "the bonniest ava" and she had herself been named after
a noble lady who bore it, in her own land, and who had done much to give
her that upright carriage by standing as her god-mother--and that for many
a long year, now, she had been the working head of the Brand household,
scarcely more so since the death of its weak, hysterical mistress, a dozen
years before, than while she was alive and pretending to a management which
she never understood.
If any one person beneath that roof, more legitimately than another,
belonged to the family and felt herself so belonging, that person was
Elspeth Graeme; and if something of the romantic, which the stern sense of
the father would have been slow to approve, had grown up in both his
children, it was to the partial love of Elspeth and her stories of Scottish
romance, poetry, history, song and superstition, carrying them away from
prosaic America to the wimpling burns and haunted glens of the land from
which their blood had been derived,--that such a feeling, fortunate or
unfortunate as the future might prove, was principally to be credited.
"Did you ring, sir? Ech, Lord, the mon's deein'!" were the two very
different exclamations made by Elspeth as she entered the room, after the
departure of the doctor, and caught sight of the situation in which the
master seemed to be lying.
"No, Elspeth, I am not 'deein' as you call it," he growled out, when the
pain of his exertion had again somewhat subsided and he could find breath
for words. "But I wish I was! Is that cursed doctor gone?"
"He was gettin' to his carriage the minute, and he's awa by this," answered
the housekeeper. "But what ava has he been doin' to ye? Murderin' ye
maybe!--they're a dolefu' uncanny set, the doctors!"
"If you ever see that man here again, and you don't have him shot or set
the dog on him, out of the house you go, neck and crop, the whole pack of
you--do you hear!" was the reply to Elspeth's comment on the medical
profession.
"Just as ye say, master," said Elspeth. "I'll set Carlo at him myself, if
ye say so; and wo but the brute will just worry him, for he does na like
him and is unco fond of snappin' aboot his heels!"
"Where is Elsie?" was the next question.
"Gone over to Mistress Hayley's the mornin'. Can I do any thing for your
leg, sir?--for the wench in the kitchen's clean daft, and I'll be wanted
there, maybe."
"No--you can do nothing. My leg is better. But send Elsie to me the moment
she comes in."
"Hark!" said the housekeeper, as a light foot sounded on the piazza and
came in through the hall. "There's the lassie hersel--I ken her step among
a thousand. I'll just send her in to you the moment she has thrawn aff her
bonnet." And the old woman departed on her errand.
There must have been an acuteness beyond nature, in the ears of old
Elspeth, if she indeed knew the tread of the young girl; for her step, as
she entered the room, was so slow, laggard and lifeless, so unlike the
usual springing rapidity of her girlish nature, that even her lover might
have been pardoned for failing to recognize it. It was as if some crushing
weight fettered her limbs and bowed down her brow. And a crushing weight
indeed rested upon her--the first unendurable grief of her young life--the
knowledge of her only brother's shame. Robert Brand marked the slow step
and saw the downcast head; and little as he could possibly know of the
connection of that demeanor with the subject of his previous thought, it
was not of that cheerful and reassuring character calculated to restore the
lost equanimity of a man insulted in the tenderest point of his honor and
chafed beyond human endurance. His first words were rough and peremptory:
"Why do you move in that manner, girl, when you come to see _me_? I do not
like it--do not let me see any more of it!"
"I was coming, father!" was poor Elsie's only answer.
"So I see--at the rate of ten feet an hour! What is the matter with you?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?--do not tell me that, girl! I know better, or you would never
carry that gloomy face and move as if you were going to your grandmother's
funeral!"
"Indeed there is nothing the matter with me, father; but there soon will
be, if you scold me!" and the young girl, making a terrible effort to be
cheerful, came up to his side, put her arm around his neck and pressed her
lips to his forehead with a movement so pure and fond that it might have
softened Nero at the moment of ordering his last wholesale murder. It
partially disarmed the pained and querulous father. He put his arm around
the daughter's waist, returned the pressure and seemed to be soothed for a
moment by resting his head against the bosom that pressed close to him. But
the demon that had been roused could only sleep thus temporarily. Directly
he put her away, though not roughly, looked her full in the face, and
asked:
"Where is your brother?"
"You know he went down to town this morning, and he has not yet come home,"
was the reply, with an effort not by any means a successful one, to keep
the voice from quavering. The practised ear of the father detected the
difference between that intonation and the usual unembarrassed utterance of
his daughter; and he naturally connected it at once with the restraint of
her manner, and noticed an evasion in her answer that might otherwise have
escaped him.
"I know he has not come home," he said. "But that was not my question. You
have been at Mrs. Hayley's where he spends quite as much of his time as
here. Have you seen him?"
Elsie Brand would have given the proudest feature of her personal
adornment, at that moment, to be able to lie! She saw that some undefined
anxiety with reference to her brother must have moved her father's repeated
questions, and naturally she feared the worst--that Carlton's mad words
had indeed been overheard, and that even in that brief space of time some
messenger of evil had travelled fast and betrayed the fatal secret. If so,
the storm was about to burst on the devoted head of her brother, not the
less deadly because she must bear the first brunt of its violence.
Yes--Elsie Brand would almost have given her right hand to be able to lie
at that moment. But her education had been as true as was her nature, and
she managed to falter out, yet more suspiciously:
"Yes, father!"
"And you _dared_ to trifle with me, girl, when I asked you a plain
question?" and Robert Brand grasped his daughter by the arm so forcibly
that she nearly screamed with the violent pressure, and tears did indeed
start to her eyes as she sobbed out--
"I did not mean to trifle with you, father. I only thought--"
"You thought that when I asked one question, I meant another, did you?" and
the face that looked upon her was set, hard and very stern. "You had better
not try the experiment again, if you do not wish to suffer for it!"
"Oh, father!" and the young girl, enough broken before, now wept outright.
But he stopped her, very roughly.
"No bawling! not a whimper! Now listen to me. You have seen your brother
since morning--since he went down to the rendezvous."
"Yes, father."
"You saw him at Mrs. Hayley's."
"Yes, father."
"And he came there to bid Margaret good-bye, before he went away, and you
are such a miserable whining school-girl that you are making all this fuss
about his absence. Is that the fact? Speak!" He still held her arm, though
his grasp was less painful than it had been at first; and his eyes looked
upon her with such a steady, anxious, almost fearful gaze, that it would
have driven away the second temptation to falsehood, even had such a
temptation once obtained power. There was nothing for it, at that moment,
but to speak the truth so far as compelled.
"No, father. Carlton is not going away." The last three words were uttered
so low, and so tangled up among the sobs that she had not been able
entirely to check, that they might not have been distinguishable except to
the preternaturally acute ear of the suspicious father.
"He is not going? Why?" The first words were harsh and loud--the last one
was almost thunder, easily heard, if any one was listening, over the whole
house. Before it the young girl shook like an aspen and broke out into
fresh sobs as she attempted to answer.
"Because--because his business will not allow--"
"Because he is _a coward!_ Answer me that question, girl, or never speak to
me again while you live!" Robert Brand had apparently forgotten all his
pain and risen from his chair, still holding his daughter's arm, as he
hurled out the interrogation and the threat. Poor Elsie saw that he knew
all, too surely; further dissembling was useless; and she dropped upon her
knees, that iron grasp still upon her arm, lifted up both her hands, and
piteously moaned--
"Yes, that is the reason! Oh, how did you hear it? Kill _me_, father, if
you will, but do not kill poor Carlton! He cannot help it--indeed he
cannot!"
They were fearful words that immediately thereafter fell from the lips of
Robert Brand--words that no provocation should ever tempt a father to
utter, but words which have been plentifully showered on the heads of the
shamed or the disobedient, by the thoughtless or the unmerciful, who
arrogated to themselves God's power of judgment and retribution, through
all the long ages.
"Get up, girl, if you do not wish me to forget that you are not yourself
the miserable hound for whom you are pleading!"
"Oh, father!" broke again from the lips of the frightened girl, who did not
move from her kneeling position.
"Get up, I say, or I will strike you with this cane as I would a dog!"
Elsie Brand staggered to her feet, she knew not how, but stood bowed before
the stern judge in an attitude of pleading quite as humble and pitiful as
that of prayer. The next words that fell upon her ears were not addressed
to her, but seemed to be spoken for others' hearing than those who dwell in
tenements of clay, while the voice that uttered them trembled in mingled
grief and indignation, and the disabled frame shook as if it had been
racked with palsy.
"_My_ son a coward! a miserable poltroon to be pointed at, spat upon, and
whipped! _My_ blood made a shame in the land, by the one whom I trusted to
honor it! God's blackest and deepest curse--"
"Oh, father! father!" broke in the young girl in a very wail of agony so
pitiful that it must have moved any heart not calloused for the moment
against all natural feeling, but that availed nothing to stop the impending
curse or even to lower the voice that uttered it.
"--God's deepest and blackest curse 'light upon the coward! shame, sorrow,
and quick death! He shall have neither house, home nor family from this
moment! I disown this bastard of my blood! I devote him to ruin and to
perdition!"
Few men have ever uttered, over the most criminal and degraded of the
offspring of their own loins, so dire an imprecation; and no father, who
has ever uttered one approaching it in horrible earnest, but is doomed here
or hereafter to feel the bitterest weight of that curse resting upon his
own head. Lear was clean distraught by wrongs beyond human endurance,
before he called upon "all the stored vengeances of heaven" to fall on the
"ingrateful top" of Goneril, and threatened both his unnatural daughters
with "such revenges" that they should be the "terrors of the earth"; and
only that incipient madness clears him from the sin and leaves him human to
demand our after pity. There can be no excuse for such paroxysms of
remorseless anger--it is difficult to supply even a palliation. And yet
there was something in the blood, in the past life and associations of
Robert Brand, coming as near to offering excuse for shame and indignation
driving to temporary madness, as could well have been offered in behalf of
any man of his day, committing a sin of such nature. And to circumstances
embodying these it is now necessary to revert, even at the expense of a
temporary pause in the directness of this narration.
CHAPTER V.
THE BIRTH AND BLOOD OF THE BRANDS--PRIDE THAT CAME DOWN FROM
THE CRUSADES--ROBERT BRAND AS SOLDIER AND PENSION-AGENT--THE
PENSIONERS OF THE REVOLUTION--HOW ELSIE RAVED, AND HOW THE
FATHER'S CURSE SEEMED TO BE ANSWERED--DR. JAMES HOLTON, AND
THE LOSS OF A CORPUS DELICTI.
It has already been indicated, in speaking of the ties which bound Elspeth
Graeme to the Brand family, that they were Scots by descent as she was by
both blood and birth. Robert Brand himself stood in the fourth remove from
Gaelic nativity, without the spirit of his race being extinct or even
modified. When Archibald Alexander, father of that William Alexander who
claimed to be Earl of Stirling in the peerage of Scotland while he was
gallantly fighting as a Major-General in the patriot army of the
Revolution, came to America in 1740, he was accompanied by a man who
claimed to hold quite as good blood as himself, though he served in little
less than a menial capacity to the heir of the attainted house of
Stirling. This was Malcolm Brand, of Perthshire, a member of the Scottish
and elder branch of the Brands of Hertfordshire in England, who at a later
day carried the two crossed swords which they had borne on their shields
since the Crusades, to augment the threatening bulls, wolves and leopards
of the Dacres, in the possession of that barony. It was in a victorious
hand-to-hand fight with a gigantic Saracen on the field of Askalon, that
Gawin de Brande, laird of Westenro in Lothian, fighting close beside King
Richard, won that proud quartering of arms; and it is to be believed that
no descendant of his blood, either in 1740 or in 1863, had quite forgotten
that exploit or the fact that the very name of the family was only another
antique appellation for the sword.
Malcolm Brand, the emigrant, was the father of a son Robert, born in New
Jersey, as Archibald Alexander was the sire of William, who so proudly
outdid the exploits of his elder blood, fighting under the leadership of
Washington. The two young men, resident nearly together among the New
Jersey hills, entered the army at the same time, and while the one rose to
the dignity of a Major-General, the other shared in his combats at Long
Island, Germantown and Monmouth, always fighting gallantly, but never
rising beyond the grade of a first-lieutenant, and dying at last a prisoner
on one of the pest-ships of the Wallabout. His son William, named after
Lord Stirling and born in 1768, had of course passed as a boy through the
trying period of the great contest, known that identification with the
patriot cause inevitable from anxiety for a father engaged in it and grief
over his lingering death by disease and privation for its sake; and it
could not be otherwise than that the ears of _his_ son, Robert (the man of
1863), should have been filled with relations calculated at once to keep
alive the pride of his blood and to identify him with the glory and honor
of the land in which his lot had been cast.
Then had come another influence, not less potent--the second breaking-out
of hostilities against England, in the War of 1812. The blood of the Brands
was not cooled--it sprung to arms; and Robert Brand, then a young lawyer,
taking the place of his father already invalided, assumed the sword of his
armorial bearings and fought with Scott at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane,
receiving so terrible an injury in the leg, at the close of the latter
battle, that he was to be a tortured cripple from that day forward, but
glorying even in the disablement and the suffering, because his injury had
not been met in some trivial accident of peaceful life, but sustained where
brave men dared their doom.
And yet another influence, not less potent, was still to come. Years after,
when Carlton Brand was a child in arms, his father, then a practising
lawyer in his native State, became identified with that most romantic and
most picturesque body of men, of whom the present age remembers but little,
and of whom the age to come will know nothing except as the knowledge is
handed down from father to son, or carried forward in such desultory
records as these--_The Pensioners of the Revolution_. At that time, not
less on account of his spotless reputation than the crippling wound
received in the service, he was appointed Pension Agent for the section in
which he resided, and duly commissioned twice a year to receive from the
War Department and pay over to the old men the somewhat scant and very
tardy pay with which the land of Washington at last smoothed the passage to
the grave of those who had been his companions.
It was Robert Brand's privilege, then, to meet those men in the familiar
intercourse of business--to listen to their tales, so often slighted by
those wiser or less reverent, of foughten field and toilsome march, of
cheerless camp and suffering in the wilderness, when this giant nation was
a wilful child unjustly scourged by a tyrant mother--to find in each some
reminder of his patriot grandfather, and some suggestion of what that
grandfather would have been had the fortune of war spared him to go down
into old age and senility.
Twice a year, as the pension day came round, one by one they gathered in
the little room where the scanty pension was to be doled--each with the
measured beat of his stick sounding upon the floor as he entered, regularly
as when his foot had beaten time in the olden days, under the iron rain of
Princeton, or on the suffering march to Valley Forge. One by one they
gathered to what was their great semi-annual holiday, with the kindly
greetings of garrulous and failing age--with the gentle complaint, so
patiently uttered, over limbs that seemed to be bowing with the weight of
time, and with the pardonable boast that it was not so when the speaker had
been young, in such a winter on the Northern Lines, or with such an officer
at Yorktown or Saratoga. When the winters--said they--were colder than they
are now, when the men were hardier, and when the women (they had all long
before gone to rest, in the family graveyard or the little plat beside the
church,) were fairer far than their daughters ever grew!
Harmless deception of age!--pleasant coloring that distance gives in time
as well as in the material world, so that the forms we once loved may be
even more beautiful in thought than they were in reality; the grassy lawns
upon which we played in childhood, greener far in memory than they ever
were beneath the sun of June; and even those hours once filled with anxiety
and vexation, so beguiled out of their uncomely features, that they have no
power to harm us in after-thought, and almost seem to have been freighted
with unalloyed happiness! There may have been a thunder-cloud rising in the
heavens, that afternoon when we went boating with Harry and Tom and Mary
and Susan and Alice, all the way down from Lovers' Bend to the Isle of
Kisses, with music, and laughter and loving words that were sweeter far
than song; and the thunder-cloud may have thickened and gathered, so that
the young lovers were drenched and very dismal-looking, long before their
return at evening; but be sure that forty years after, when the day is
remembered, only the sunshine, the smiling faces and the flashing water is
seen, and if the thunder-storm has a place in memory at all, it comes back
more as a pleasure than a disappointment. Mary may have had a cloud upon
her brow, that evening at the garden-gate, from the absence of a ribbon
lightly promised, or the presence of a recollection how some one flirted
with Julia on the evening before; and there may even have been a tiff
verging far towards a lover's quarrel, before the reconciliation and the
parting under the moon; but when the hair has grown gray, and Mary is with
the millions sleeping in the breast of our common mother, only the
moonlight, that dear last kiss, and the rapture of happy love are
remembered, and that checkered hour is looked back upon as one of unmixed
enjoyment. Time is the flatterer of memory, as well as the consoler of
grief, and perhaps has no holier office. So it was well that the old men's
mental eyes were dim when their physical vision was failing; and when we
grow old as they, if the scythe of the destroyer cut us not away long
before, may the far-away past be gilded for us as it was for them, by the
rosy hue of fading remembrance, until all the asperities, the hard
realities, the sharp and salient edges and angles of life, are smoothed and
worn away forever!
Sitting side by side, they talked--those bent and worn and gray old men--of
scenes long matters of honored history, glorying (ah! honest and natural
glory!) in having stood guard at the tent of Wayne, or shared the coarse
fare of Sumter in the Southern woods, but most of all if happily the eye of
Washington had chanced to beam upon them, and his lips (those lips that
seldom broadly smiled) approved or thanked their honest service. Few men,
even of those who fought beside him, seemed ever to have known a smile from
the Father of his Country; but for those few there always beamed a light of
glorious memory to which the all-repaying word and the intoxicating smile
of the Great Corsican would have been empty and valueless.
It was easy, twenty or thirty years afterwards, to remember the fire that
blazed in the dim eyes of old Job Marston, as he told how Washington
commended him for his good conduct on the afternoon of the dreadful day of
Long Island, when Sullivan's legion broke and fled like frightened
sheep,--and how the veteran straightened himself upon his staff as if the
head which had once borne the praise of the Joshua of American Liberty
should scarcely bend even to time. Or the quivering of the hand of Walter
Thorne, one of the men who bore, through every trial and danger, the pledge
of faith of the Monmouth League--quivering yet with the anger which had
brooded for more than fifty years,--as he pictured so plainly the burning
of his father's house by the Refugees, the acres of broad land laid waste
by them, the cattle driven towards the royal lines from his own homestead,
the arming of his friends, the chase, the recapture, and the ghastly figure
of the Refugee captain as they hung him on a spreading limb that spanned
the road, a sacrifice not only for the home in ashes but to the manes of
Captain Huddy, scarcely yet taken down from his oak-tree gallows on the
heights of Navesink. Or the quietly felicitous chuckle with which Stephen
Holmes, who had been one of "Captain Huyler's men" in the operations of
that patriot marine freebooter around the shores of the lower bay of New
York, detailed the success of a night attack in boats pretending to carry
live-stock and oysters for sale, by which one vessel of the British fleet
lying in the bay was captured, much welcome spoil fell into their hands for
the use of needy families at home, and all the remaining vessels of the
squadron rode uncomfortably in the bay for a long time after. Or the half
playful and half indignant raising of the cane of Robert Grey, when told by
his old companions, for the five-hundredth time beyond a doubt, that he was
suspected of a share in Arnold's treason, for not stopping the disguised
Andre as he passed his sentinel post below West Point, before he fell into
the hands of the three very common and insignificant men made immortal by
one single act--Williams, Paulding and Van Wert. There would have been no
pretence in the motion, spite of his eighty years and faltering limbs, had
the speaker hazarded more than a jest against the faithfulness of the old
man's service in the "dark day." But easiest of all was it to remember the
story of Thomas West, wounded, and crippled from that day forth, in
assisting to bear the wounded Lafayette from the field of Brandywine, and
named a subaltern officer at the close of that memorable action. His was
the seat of honor; and his was something more, even, than that measure of
respect demanded by all and so cheerfully paid to white hairs and honorable
scars.
Seldom was there a voice to speak one word of disrespect or undervaluation
in the old men's company; and though the privilege of garrulous and failing
age was often taken, and though the story once full of life and interest
grew sadly tedious when again and again repeated,--yet there was no pardon,
and deserved to be none, for him who forgot that reverence due to the men
who bore the last personal recollections of the seven-years war. Only once,
within the experience of Robert Brand as a Pension Agent, was such
disrespect shown; and then the punishment was so signal that there were no
fears of the impropriety being repeated. Mart Tunison, a wealthy young
landowner, rudely jostled old Job Marston on one occasion, and when called
to account for the offence, snapped his fingers at the veteran as a "cursed
old humbug, always in the way and always telling stories of battles he had
never seen." "You are rich, they say, Mart Tunison," said the old man,
while the younger one could not read the flash that still lived in his
faded eye. "I _am_ rich, and what is that to you, grand-daddy?" was the
answer, with a slap of the hand on the jingling pocket. "Yes, you are rich,
and most people do not know how you became so!" almost hissed the old man,
little knowing how he was pointing a moral for a future day by speaking of
the "shoddy" of that by-gone time. "I will tell all your friends, and you,
how you got so stuffed up that you can snap your fingers in an old man's
face! You are living on the proceeds of the money that your Tory
grandfather, old Tom Tunison, made by stealing cattle, when he was one of
the Refugee Cow-Boys, and driving them over the lines to sell to the
British, before he ran away to Nova Scotia to save his neck!" Mart Tunison,
if he had ever before known the real origin of his wealth, which is
doubtful,--would probably have given the best field of all his broad lands
to prevent that revelation of the shame of his family, which afterwards
followed him like a thing of ill-omen, to the very grave!
There was at that time in the office of Robert Brand, a stripling youngster
who promised very little good to the world and has probably as yet
disappointed no one--who thought more of play than of work, of music than
of mortgages, of Burns than Blackstone, and of a rosy-cheeked girl who came
into the office on some little errand to the "'Squire" than of the most
proud and stately of his male clients. Among his vices, he had a fancy for
jingling verse; and one day when the semi-annual visit of the pensioners
had just terminated and he had listened afresh to the same old tales of
glory told over again in the same faltering accents that he had heard so
many times before, his one virtue of reverence for the aged and the
venerable rose into an idle rhyme, which may have a fit place in this
connection, and which he called
THE PENSIONERS.
They come but twice a year,
When the pension-day rolls round,--
Old men with hoary hair
And their faces to the ground.
One leans upon his crutch;
And one is upright still,
As if he bore Time's clutch
With an iron nerve and will.
And feeble are the steps
That so patiently they feel;
And they kiss with trembling lips
The old Bible and the seal;
And they lay with care away,
In wallets old and worn,
The scant and tardy pay
Of a life of toil and scorn.
They love a cheerful pipe
And a warm place in the sun,
From an age so old and ripe
To call memories one by one;--
To tell of Arnold's crime,
And of Washington's proud form
That beamed, in battle time,
A beacon o'er the storm.--
To tell of Yorktown's day,
When the closing fight was gained,--
When Cornwallis went away
And the eagle was unchained;
To show us, o'er and o'er,
The seamed and withered scars
That many a hero bore,
As his passport from the wars.
'Tis pride, with these old men,
To tell what they have seen,
Of battle-fields, again
With their harvest bright and green:
'Twill be pride, when we are old,
To say that in our youth
We heard the tales they told
And looked on them in their truth.
They are the last sad link
Of a race of men with ours,
Who stood on ruin's brink
And built up fair freedom's towers.
They are passing, as the foam
From the ocean wave departs,
But finding yet a home
In heaven, and in our hearts.
And when the last is gone,
To their memory we will build
A pyramid of stone
Whose top the sun shall gild
When the name of patriot weal
And of tyrants' bitter wrong
Shall be told but in a tale
And known but in a song.
The time then prophesied has come; though the monument then promised has
not been erected, and though it may never be, because a later and grander
though scarce nobler struggle to preserve what was then first created,
almost dwarfs the memory of the first contest and demands all the resources
of wealth and art for its commemoration. The Pensioners of the Revolution
are all gone, long ago, on the line of march to that great meeting where
the last pension, whether of good or evil, shall be told out.
Almost every year, beneath the eye of the Pension Agent, one more withered
leaf would drop from the bough where it had feebly fluttered, and sad
comments be made by the survivors when they met, with: "Ah,
well-a-day!--poor ---- is gone!" and "Well, we are very old, and we must
all follow him--some day!" with nervous shakings of the head and tremblings
of the palsied hand, that told to all but themselves how soon the end must
come. Thinner and thinner grew the group, reduced to six--to four--to
three--to two! Oh, that sad, mournful, heart-breaking two!--enough gone to
mark the coming extinction; enough still left to hold their melancholy
converse! And then one day there came but _one_, who looked vacantly round
on the empty space and seemed to remember that others than himself must
once have been there, but to remember no more. The "Last Man" had not then
been written, and _Geoffry Dale_ was yet to spring from the imagination or
the memory of the dramatist and supply poor _Jesse Rural_ Blake with one of
his best opportunities for throat-choking pathos; but in the last of the
pensioners his history was sadly prefigured. One other lonely visit, and
then the survivor was gone. All the group had dropped away. Their forms
seemed to linger, long after the forms that cast them had mouldered into
impalpable dust. It was the most natural thing in life for Robert Brand,
months and even years after, to turn when hearing the measured beat of an
old man's cane upon the floor, and look to see if the comer was not one of
the veterans of Yorktown or of Trenton, yet lingering far behind the time
of his companions. But no--death had come to all, and as yet no
resurrection. The last pittance had been paid them, and laid away for the
last time by their careful fingers; and they, too, had been laid away by
the hoarding miser of human forms, in quiet graves in those humble country
church-yards dotting the bosom of that land which they had helped to free
and to cover with human glory!
Perhaps they died in good time--before the dark hour came back again after
a glorious morning and a cloudless noon. Perhaps it is well that the last
of the Revolutionary veterans had passed beyond acute pain and heart-felt
shame, before the attempt at national suicide came to embitter their last
moments with the belief that after all they might have labored and suffered
in vain. But their memory does not die. Mecca and Jerusalem are blended in
the sacredness of that pilgrimage which the reverent heart travels back
through the years to pay them; and if there is yet a leaven of
self-sacrificing devotion in our national character sufficient to bear us
on triumphantly to the great end, the yeast of true patriotism from which
it is made was preserved through the long night of corruption and misrule,
in the breasts of the Fathers of the Republic.
Their children have long been old men now. Their very grandchildren begin
to show gray hairs. Following close upon the steps of the Last Man of the
Revolution--the last of the men who could say that they saw and took part
in that throe which gave birth to a nation,--tread all those who can even
say that they ever saw them and took them by the hand. A few years, and the
last of these, too, will be quiet and voiceless. The chain of personal
recollection is growing thin,--it may break to-morrow; and "the rest is
silence."
Such was the blood of Robert Brand, and such had been the influences and
surroundings of his earlier life--himself a soldier when in possession of
health and vigor, and the companion, friend and guardian of the noblest of
all American soldiery when he became disabled and inactive. He loved his
native land with an idolatry bordering on insanity; and during the long
struggle between the interests of the sections, preceding the war, he had
imbibed love of free institutions and hatred of slavery to a degree little
less than fanatical. No regret had weighed so heavily upon him, when the
note of conflict sounded in 1861, as the fact that his aged and crippled
frame must prevent his striking one blow in a cause so holy; and if he held
one pride more dearly than another, it was to be found in the remembrance
that he had a noble and gallant son, too busy and too much needed at home,
thus far, to join the ranks of his country's defenders in the field, but
ready when the day of positive need should come, to maintain unsullied the
honor of his race. What marvel, all these surroundings considered, that the
knowledge of that son being an abject poltroon should nearly have unseated
his reason, and that he should have uttered words which only the partial
insanity of wounded pride and rankling shame could supply with any shadow
of excuse?
At the close of the last chapter, and before this long explanatory episode
intervened to break the progress of the narration, Elsie Brand, the
agonized sister and daughter, was seen standing before her father, with
hands clasped in agony and lips uttering agonized pleadings. But the very
instant after, when the terrible severity of that parental curse had been
fully rounded from the lips and that fatal evidence given that for the
moment all natural affection had given way to impious rage and
denunciation,--the young girl stood erect, her blue eyes still tearful but
flashing anger of which they commonly seemed to be little capable, and her
lips uttering words as determined as those of the madman, even if they were
less furious and vindictive:
"You may strike me if you like, but I do not care for you, now--not one
snap of my finger! You are not my father--you are nobody's father, but a
bad, wicked, unfeeling old man, gray headed enough to know better, and yet
cursing your own flesh and blood as if you wished to go to perdition
yourself and carry everybody else along with you!"
The very audacity of this speech partially sobered the enraged man, and he
only ejaculated in a lower but still angry tone:
"What!"
"What I say and what I mean!" the young girl went on, oblivious or heedless
of any parental authority at the moment. "I do not love you--I hate and
shudder at you! I would rather be my poor brother, a coward and disgraced
as he may be, than his miserable father cursing him like a brute!"
"Do you dare----" the father began to say, in a louder voice and with the
thunder again threatening, but Elsie Brand was proving, just then, that the
gift of heedless speech "ran in the family," and that for the moment she
"had the floor" in the contest of denunciation.
"Oh, you need not look at me in that manner!" she said, marking the
expression of the old man's eyes and conscious that he might at any moment
recover himself sufficiently to pour out upon her, for her unpardonable
impudence, quite as bitter a denunciation as he had lately vented against
her disgraced brother. "I am not afraid of your eyes, or of your tongue.
You have turned Carlton out of doors, for a mere nothing, and I am going
with him. I will never set foot in this house again, never, until----"
How long was the period the indignant girl intended to set for her absence,
must ever remain in doubt, with many other things of much more consequence;
for the sentence thus begun, was never completed. In at the open front
door, through the parlor and into the room of the invalid, at that moment
staggered Kitty Hood. The phrase descriptive of her movement is used
advisedly and with good reason; for fright, exhaustion and the terrible
heat of the June meridian had reduced the young school-mistress to a most
pitiable condition. Her face was one red glow, her brow streamed with
perspiration, and she was equally destitute of strength and out of breath.
This strange and unannounced interruption naturally broke the unpleasant
chain of conversation between father and daughter; and the eyes of both,
during her moment of enforced silence to recover breath, looked upon her
with equal wonder and alarm.
"Oh, Mr. Brand!" and here the breath gave out again and she sank exhausted
into the chair which Elsie pushed up to her.
"You are sick? Somebody has insulted or hurt you? What _is_ the matter,
Kitty?" she asked.
"Oh, no, no!" at last the school-mistress mustered breath to say, at short,
jerky intervals. "Nothing ails _me_, except that I am out of breath; but
your son, Mr. Brand."
"Well, what of _him_?" asked the old man, his tone sharp and angry and his
brow frowning, confident that the coming information must have some
connection with the disgraceful report of the morning--that Kitty Hood had
only run herself out of breath in her anxiety to tell his family unwelcome
news that they already knew too well.
"Oh, sir, Mr. Carlton--your poor brother, Elsie!--is dead!"
"Dead!" The word had two echoes--one, from the lips of Robert Brand, little
else than a groan; and the other from poor tortured Elsie, compounded
between groan and shriek.
"Oh, yes, how can I tell it?" the young school-mistress went on, as fast as
her broken breath would allow. "I found him lying dead, only a little while
ago, by the gate, down at the blind-road, as I came across from school;
and I have run all the way here to tell you!"
"My poor brother dead! oh, Carlton!" moaned Elsie Brand; then, but an
instant after, and before the old man had found time to speak again, the
curse came up in connection with the bereavement and she broke out,
hysterically: "See what you have done, father! You wished poor Carlton
dead, and now you have your cruel wish! Oh, my poor, poor brother!"
"Silence, girl!" spoke Robert Brand, sharply, with a not unnatural dislike
to have the school-mistress made aware of what had so lately passed. The
old man was terribly affected, but he managed to control himself and to
speak with some approach to calmness.
"You are sure, Kitty, that you saw my son lying dead?"
"Oh, yes, Mr. Brand, he was lying dead on the grass close by the gate."
"Lying alone?" The voice of the father trembled, in spite of himself, as he
asked the question.
"All alone, and he could only have been dead a few moments. He looked so."
"Was there--" and the old lawyer tried to steady his voice as he had many a
time before done when asking equally solemn questions concerning the fate
of other men's children--"did you see any thing to prove what killed him?
He went away from home on horseback--"
"Yes, he was on horseback at Mrs. Hayley's only a little while ago," Elsie
mustered strength to interrupt.
"Did you see his horse?--had he fallen from it--or--" and then the voice of
the father, who but a few moments before had believed his love for his son
crushed out forever, entirely broke down. Heaven only knew the agony of the
question he was attempting to put; for the thought had taken possession of
him that that son, overwhelmed by the knowledge that he would be pointed
out and scoffed as a poltroon, had shown his second lack of courage by
laying violent hands on his own life and rushing unbidden into the
presence of his Maker!
"No," answered Kitty Hood, setting her teeth hard as she realized that the
time had come when she must prove her own honesty at the possible sacrifice
of the life of the man who had been her lover. "No, I did not see his
horse. He had not been killed by falling from it, I am sure. He had been
_murdered_!"
"Murdered!" Again the word was a double echo from the very dissimilar
voices of father and daughter; the latter speaking in the terror of the
thought, the former under the conviction that the dreadful truth was being
revealed, and that, though the young girl did not suspect the fact, the
crime would be found to have been _self_-murder.
"There was blood on his face and on the grass," poor Kitty went on, "and
there was a bundle lying close beside him, that I had seen under the arm
of--of--"
"Eh, what? Under whose arm?" asked the father, in a quick voice, as the
relation took this new turn.
"Richard Compton's!" choked out Kitty Hood.
"Richard Compton's!" again echoed the old man. "Why he was your--"
"We were engaged to be married," cried poor Kitty, at last overwrought and
bursting into tears. "But I must tell the truth, even if it hangs him and
breaks my heart. He was at the school-house only a little while before; he
was angry with Mr. Carlton, and threatened him; and I am afraid that he
killed him."
"Oh, this is dreadful!" said Elsie.
"Dreadful indeed!" replied Robert Brand, whose own grief and horror were
somewhat modified if not lessened by the thought in what a situation the
honest young girl was placing herself and her lover. He reached back and
pulled the bell-rope again, and again Elspeth Graeme made her appearance, a
little surprised to find three persons in the room where she had before
left but two, the third coming unannounced, and all three of the faces
looking as if their owners had been summoned to execution.
"Tell Stephen to get up the large carriage, instantly, and have it round
within five minutes," was the order to the old woman, delivered in a quick
and agitated voice.
"Are ye gaein' out, sir?" was the inquiry, in reply.
"Yes, but what is that to you, woman?"
"Naethin', maybe, only you're clean daft if ye'r thinkin' of it, Mr. Robert
Brand."
"I am not only thinking of it but going to do it; and the quicker you do my
bidding, the better."
"Gang yer ways, then, for an uncanny, unmanageable auld ne'er-do-weel!" was
the grumbling comment of the Scotch woman, as she prepared to obey the
injunction. She strode half way through the parlor, then returned and fired
another shot into the invalid's room before she finally departed: "Hech,
but ye've been sendin' away the doctor wi' the grin on his grunzie, and
wha' will I ca' when ye come back a' ram-feezled and done over--answer me
that, noo!"
Less than five minutes sufficed to bring the carriage to the door, with its
team of well-groomed bays, and with much exertion (of which the stalwart
Elspeth furnished no small proportion) the invalid was placed in it and so
surrounded with cushions that he could ride with comparative ease. Elsie's
tearful request to be allowed to accompany him in his quest of the body of
her brother was sharply denied, with orders that both Kitty and herself
should remain within the house until his return; and the carriage drove
rapidly away towards the point designated by the school-mistress, while the
housekeeper was learning the fearful tidings from the lips of the two
girls, and uttering broken laments and raining tears down her coarse
cheeks, over "her winsome bairn that had been sae sair wanchancie!"
Scarcely more time than had been consumed in getting ready the vehicle
elapsed before the carriage, driven at rapid speed, dashed up to the spot
that had been indicated by Kitty, the eyes of the father looking out in
advance with an indescribable horror, to catch the first glimpse of the
body of a son whom he half accused himself, in his own heart, of murdering.
A doctor's top-sulky and a saddled horse, with two men, were seen standing
near the gate as they approached; but, strangely enough, they saw no dead
body. One of these men, Robert Brand saw, was the young farmer, Richard
Compton, who had been accused by Kitty of committing that terrible crime;
the other, standing by the side of his professional sulky, was a man of
twenty-five, of medium height, very carefully dressed, fair faced, dark
haired and dark eyed, with features well rounded and an inexpressibly sweet
smile about the handsome mouth, which might have made an impression, under
proper circumstances, upon other hearts than the susceptible one of Elsie
Brand. Dr. James Holton, as has before been said, was a young physician, in
very moderate practice, pleasing though very quiet in manners,
irreproachable in character (an unpopular point, as we are all well aware,
in one of the heroes of any tale), and considered very much more eligible
as a match by the young lady with whom his name has before been connected,
than by the parent who was supposed to have the disposal of her hand. Dr.
Holton, as many people believed, possessed skill enough and was
sufficiently attentive and studious in his profession, to have run a closer
race with the local professional autocrat, Dr. Pomeroy, than he had yet
been able to do, but for the skilfully managed sneers and quiet
undervaluations by which the elder had kept him from winning public
confidence. For more than two years he had been a frequent visitor at
Robert Brand's, received with undisguised pleasure by Elsie and treated
with great consideration by her brother, but meeting from the respected
head of the family that peculiar treatment which can no more be construed
into cordiality than insult, and which says, quite as plainly as words
could speak, "You are a respectable young man enough, and may be received
with politeness as a visitor; but you do not amount to enough in the
world, ever to become a member of my family." Quarrel as he might with Dr.
Philip Pomeroy, the old gentleman persisted in retaining him as his medical
adviser; and it was her knowledge of the antagonism between the two and of
the estimation in which each was held, that had induced the housekeeper to
make her parting suggestion of the effect which must follow his order to
set the dog on Pomeroy if he ever again attempted to approach the house. No
one, meanwhile, could better appreciate his own position than Dr. James
Holton; and while well aware that he loved Elsie Brand dearly, and firmly
believing that she held towards him an unwavering affection, he was content
to wait until his fortunes should so improve as to make him a more eligible
match for her, or until in some other providential manner the obstacles to
their union might be removed.
Such was the gentleman who approached Robert Brand's carriage door with a
bow, the moment the coachman had reined up his horses, and while that
gentleman was looking around with fearful anxiety for an object which his
eyes did not discover.
"We are in trouble about your son," he said, before the other had spoken.
"Something very extraordinary has occurred. Have you heard--"
"That my son was killed and lying here? Yes. Miss Kitty Hood, the
school-mistress, saw the body as she passed, and came to inform me."
"Kitty Hood!" gasped Richard Compton, turning from the fence against which
he had been leaning, and exhibiting a face nearly as white as that
traditionally supposed to belong to a ghost.
"Is it true?" continued the father. "If so, where is the body?"
"That is what puzzles us," answered the physician. "Mr. Compton, here, had
an altercation with your son--"
"Excuse me, Doctor, for telling the story myself," said the farmer,
interrupting. "Altercation is not the word--it was a _fight_. The devil
was in me, I suppose, and I insulted Carlton Brand like a fool, and dared
him to get off his horse to fight me. He got off, we exchanged a few blows,
and directly he knocked me stiff. Perhaps I hit him in some unlucky place
at the same time--I do not know. All that I do know is, that when I got my
senses again, he lay stiff as a poker there on the grass. I thought him
dead or dying, and rode away on his horse for the doctor. When we got here,
just a moment ago, the body, or Mr. Carlton Brand with the life in him--the
Lord knows which!--was gone."
"My son got off his horse to fight you, you say?" asked Robert Brand, in
such a tone of interest as almost seemed to be exulting.
"Yes, sir," answered the farmer.
"And actually fought you?--do not tell me a falsehood on this point, young
man, for your life!"
"Fought me? yes, he did more than that--_whipped_ me; and I do not let
myself be whipped every day. If I ever found strength to rise again, I was
just going to own up beat and ask his pardon."
From that moment, an expression of pain which had been perceptible on
Robert Brand's face from the instant of his conversation with Dr. Pomeroy,
changed in its character and lightened up, so to speak, if it did not
entirely depart. "Not so total and abject a poltroon as I feared!" was his
thought. He had not alighted from the carriage, his crippled limb making
that step difficult; but leaning over the side of it, he saw something on
the grass reminding him of what Kitty had alleged.
"There is blood upon the grass--whose is it?--my son's?" he asked.
"Mine, every drop of it--out of my nose. See, here is the rest of it,"
answered Dick Compton, drawing from his pocket the bloody handkerchief with
which he had tried to improve the appearance of his countenance, while
riding away after the doctor.
"What do you make of all this, Doctor?" at length asked Robert Brand.
"It puzzles me, of course," said the medical man. "It is strange how Mr.
Brand should have fallen for dead, if he was not. And yet it is not likely
that any one would have taken up the body and carried it away, if he was.
It would seem most probable that--"
"That he is still alive?"
"That his apparent death was only the result of a fit of some character,
and that, coming to after Mr. Compton left, and missing his horse, he has
gone homeward, or in some other direction, on foot."
"So I should think," answered the father. "Stephen, drive me home again. If
you should hear any thing further, Doctor--"
"I will do myself the honor of letting you know immediately," answered the
young physician, with a bow and a quiet consciousness that, from stress of
circumstances, the man whom he yet hoped to call father-in-law, had at last
given him a tacit invitation to come to his house on _his_ business.
"And what shall I do with the horse?" asked Compton.
"As it seems that you have been the means of forcing the rider off its
back, if you have not killed him, I think you can do no less than to ride
him home to Mr. Brand's stables," said the doctor.
"I am sorry that I brought you here for nothing, Doctor. You don't think
that I need to go and give myself up, eh?"
"I am very _glad_ that you brought me here for nothing, as it appears,
instead of for something," answered the doctor. "No, I do not think that
you will have occasion to give any thing up, except your bad temper and
your propensity for fighting peaceable men along public roads. I wish you a
very good day, Mr. Brand!" and stepping into his sulky, he drove away down
the road to attend to some one of his limited number of patients; while the
carriage containing Robert Brand whirled rapidly home again, followed at a
little distance by Dick Compton on Carlton Brand's horse, the fear of being
proved a murderer somewhat lifted from his mind; his military pants
haunting him a little less than they had done during the former ride; and
the bundle which had at one time threatened to prove so damning an evidence
against him, hugged up under his left arm.
CHAPTER VI.
THE RESIDENCE OF DR. POMEROY--NATHAN BLADESDEN AND ELEANOR
HILL--A KNEELING WOMAN AND A RIGID QUAKER--THE RUIN THAT A
LETTER HAD WROUGHT--A PARTING THAT SEEMED ETERNAL--CARLTON
BRAND ALIVE ONCE MORE, AND A GLANCE AT THE FATAL LETTER.
It sometimes happens, in this world which fast people consider dull and
slow, that events crowd themselves very closely, both as to time and space.
Within a very limited section, in a period covering scarcely more than an
hour, we have seen a complication of occurrences, affecting many persons,
sufficient to occupy many hours in the recital. And yet the storehouses of
event and circumstance have not yet been at all closely ransacked; and that
June-day has yet much to reveal, affecting some of the persons already
introduced, and others who have not yet come into the field of observation.
The spot at which the conflict between Carlton Brand and Richard Compton
occurred, it will be remembered, was at the intersection of the highway
leading down to the Schuylkill at Market Street, by a blind road which ran
back southwardly through the wood,--and that the request of the lawyer to
Compton that he would open the gate admitting to that blind road, was made
by the farmer the occasion of that quarrel and fight which we have seen
terminate so singularly.
Following that blind road half a mile through the wood, southward towards
the Darby road, the visitor descended the little range of high land crowned
by the wood, crossed a wide meadow with the frogs sunning themselves on the
banks of the little brooks that ran beneath the bridges of the causeway,
and the blackbirds singing in the low clumps of elder-bush that grew beside
them, and found himself, on the other side, rising another slight hillock
and at the back gate of the residence of Dr. Philip Pomeroy.
This was a house of modern construction, and of a completeness betokening
the wealth of the owner; standing near the crown of the hillock, with the
garden at the back sloping away towards the meadow (a bad slope, that
towards the north, all the agriculturists in the section averred); handsome
shrubbery in the broad yard lying before the pillared front or south face
of the house; and a good many fine trees of inconsiderable age, with the
pine everywhere predominant, promising abundant shade in coming years, both
in front and at the rear. The continuation of the blind road which crossed
the meadow, extended past the house on the west side, immediately beside
the pickets of the yard enclosure, and running across to the Darby road
afforded access to both the great highways, with only short distances of
travel, and at the price of opening an occasional gate, which merely
answered the purpose of stretching the cramped limbs of the rider. Some
persons, who knew the extensive practice of Dr. Pomeroy, were disposed to
wonder that he had not located himself immediately on one of the great
roads, with no necessity for traversing by-ways to reach them; while
others, who better knew the peculiarities of his will, believed that his
motive was a fancy for being comparatively isolated and a little baronial.
Whether he really had any motive whatever in selecting the location, except
the desire of pleasing himself, is a matter of very little consequence.
There was a light buggy, drawn by two magnificent horses, standing at a
post in the road, very near the house, at a little after noon on that day;
and within the house certain developments were at the same moment being
made, so illustrative of the depth to which human depravity can descend
when the rein is given to all base and unholy passions, that the pen of the
narrator, who is merely attempting a feeble recital of actual occurrences
in the real life of to-day, pauses at the task before it, the fact being so
certain that the circumstances about to be recorded will be supposed to
have sprung from the disorder of an unscrupulous imagination, instead of
being the fruit of sad research and knowledge that would be avoided if such
a thing was possible.
The middle portion of the front of the doctor's residence, immediately over
the somewhat narrow portico, was a sitting-room of small dimensions,
tastily furnished; while out of it opened a little bed-room, the white
curtains and snowy bed-drapery of which, seen in glimpses through the door,
suggested maiden purity and peace or that bridal rest which should be quite
as pure and holy. The sitting-room had at that moment two occupants; and
the picture presented was such as no looker-on would have been likely to
forget while he lived.
Nearly in the centre of the room stood a gentleman some years past middle
age, large framed and with large hands, tall and commanding in figure,
unexceptionably dressed in garments betraying the Quaker cut, and with that
air of undeniable respectability which no pretence can ever imitate,
conveyed by every motion of the man and every fold of his garments. He was
dark-eyed and with features a little prominent; and years had made a
perceptible mark on the smoothness of his face, at the same time that they
had heavily grayed his neat side-whiskers and dashed heavy masses of gray
among the still-curling locks that clustered upon his head. A merchant or
banker, evidently, from manner and general appearance--and one to whom the
idea of dishonorable conduct and the thought of a disgraced reputation
would be alike unendurable. With a face in which sorrow seemed to be
struggling with anger, this man stood holding a letter clenched in his
right hand, and looking down upon something at his feet. That something was
a woman.
The woman was kneeling, with hands clasped in entreaty, hair shaken
partially loose, face streaming with tears, and her whole system so shaken
by the sobs convulsing it that the most dangerous form of hysterics might
be very likely to follow that excitement. Even when kneeling it was to be
observed that her figure was tall, finely moulded and upright--that her
face was fair, pleasant, and notably handsome, though the features were too
small, the dark eyes mournful, and the general impression created that of
confiding helplessness very likely to degenerate into dangerous
weakness--that her hands were long, taper and delicate, as beseemed her
figure--that her brown hair was very full, rich, silken and glossy--and
that she had probably numbered some five-and-twenty summers. Formed to be
loved, protected and shielded from every harm, and certain to return for
that love and protection the most unreserved affection and the most
unquestioning obedience; and yet kneeling there with that upon her face
which told a tale of the most cruel outrage quite as plainly as the
quivering lips could speak it!
Much has been said of the sadness of the spectacle when a strong man weeps,
as compared to the same exhibition of feeling by a woman. It is equally sad
when a woman is seen kneeling to any other power than that of her God! It
seems man's province, given alike by nature and the laws of chivalry, to
bend his proud knee in other aspects than that of devotion; and even when
he is showing that prostration his eye may be glowing with the conscious
pride of the future conqueror; but what except the most abject shame or the
most overwhelming sorrow, can be shown when the delicate limb of womanhood
kisses the green sod or the floor beneath her tread? To save by pitiful
entreaties a perilled honor--to beg through blinding tears and choking
sobs the restoration of that honor lost, that can often so easily be given
back to her by the hands of the tyrant who will not hear her cry--to
implore the concealment of a shame too heavy to bear--to plead for the
forfeit life of some one dearer than the very pulses beating in her own
bosom--to moan for the restoration of some object of love and protection,
her babe perhaps, reft from her and her heart and her arms left alike
empty--ay, to wail for the boon of a crust that shall chase starvation from
the thin lips of herself or her child and keep them yet a little longer as
clinging sufferers upon the earth,--these have been the compelling motives
so often bending the knee of woman since the earliest day of recorded time.
And yet not one of all the long array of unchronicled martyrs has been
bowed under a deeper wrong than was that day made manifest, or uttered a
more piteous appeal than that day went up to heaven!
"Oh, do not cast me off!--do not desert me, Mr. Bladesden!" wailed a voice
that would have been marvellously sweet and tender had it not been broken
and roughened by grief, while her poor hands wrung and agonized themselves
in sad sympathy with the writhings of her cowering form. "Do not take away
from me my last hope of knowing one hour of peace before they put me into
the coffin! I am no worse to-day than I was yesterday! Oh, do pity and save
me, even if you cannot love me any longer!"
"I do pity thee, Eleanor Hill, and I should like to save thee if I could!"
answered a voice rich, full and strong, with only an occasional tremor in
its intonation, and the Quaker phraseology seeming to accord peculiarly
with the voice as well as the general appearance of the man. "But thou hast
deceived me, and the plain people--"
"Oh, no, I did not deceive you, Mr. Bladesden," the poor girl interrupted.
"Do let me speak! Do let me try if I cannot move your heart to believe that
I have never willingly done wrong--that I have never been intentionally
wicked!"
"Can thee deny what is in this letter, Eleanor Hill?" asked the Quaker,
his voice trembling, in spite of himself, a little more than it had before
done. Then he added, with something very like a sob in his throat, that
seemed strangely at variance with the general calmness of his demeanor: "I
am rich, Eleanor--very rich, men say; and yet I would give half of all that
I have won in these many years that have made my hair gray, if I could see
thee lay thy hand upon thy heart and look up in my face and say: 'The man
who writes this writes falsehood!'"
"I cannot--oh, God, you know that I cannot, Mr. Bladesden!" sobbed the poor
girl. "It is true in word, and yet heaven knows ho
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