A MAN OF WOE
To return to Will Harcourt, and that fifteenth of November, when, at
midnight, he disappeared from the Isle of Storms.
The earth was as heavily burdened with sorrow that night as all nights.
There were men and women and children starving, freezing, perishing, in
garrets, in cellars, and in the streets; there were men and women and
children watching the dying faces of their best beloved; there were
human beings languishing in prisons, hospitals, lunatic asylums; there
were criminals in condemned cells, waiting the execution of their death
sentence; but perhaps the most miserable being on the face of the
burdened earth on that fifteenth of November was Will Harcourt, as he
turned away from the face of his beloved and confiding Roma and walked
with his Evil Genius down to the water side to take the boat.
He spoke no word after leaving the house, but walked moodily, with his
head hanging upon his breast and his arms down by his sides.
Hanson perceived his deep despair, and even his selfish heart was
touched.
“Brace up, man! brace up!” he cried, clapping Harcourt heartily on the
shoulder, as they passed through the stubble field on their way down to
the boat. “You have lost Roma, to be sure, but you are not the first man
ever disappointed in love; and this wisdom of the ages declares that
‘there are as good fish in the sea as ever were caught out of it.’ You
are very young yet. You will be in love, or fancy yourself in love, with
a score of women yet before you are fit to marry.”
Harcourt replied never a word, but walked on like a condemned prisoner
before his executioner.
“Oh, come! Pull yourself together! You have lost Roma, to be sure; but
just consider what you have saved, man—your life, your liberty, your
good name, your future, your ambition, your proud career, your aged
mother’s life and peace of mind, your betrothed bride’s honor and
reputation—all these that you have saved by one sacrifice, you would
have lost, had you been proved a swindler, a sneak thief and a murderer.
Be wise, and reflect on the things you have saved, not on the girl you
have lost, and who, after your deed, must have been lost to you in any
case.”
Still Harcourt did not speak.
They went down to the sands, where the boat was waiting.
“Good-by! Bon voyage!” cried Hanson, gayly lifting his hat as Harcourt
went slowly, mechanically into the boat and dropped upon his seat.
The men, without a word, laid themselves to their oars and rowed rapidly
to the steamer that lay waiting off the coast.
She was already getting up steam, and as soon as the men and passenger
boarded her, and the boat was hauled up, she started on her southern
course.
There was no one on deck but the pilot, the watch, and the one passenger
who had just come on board. All the rest, even the boat’s crew, had
turned in.
Harcourt sat in the stern of the steamer, with his eyes fixed on the
dark water beneath.
The wrench of his parting with Roma lacerated his heart; the thought of
his treachery toward her tortured his conscience. Was there a criminal
on earth so black as he? Was there a soul in hell so miserable?
What would Roma think of him when she should come to know his deed?
Truly “a deed without a name,” that no law had ever forbidden, because
no man or devil had ever dreamed of it!
He loathed himself and his life as he loathed death and putrefaction.
And yet it seemed to him that all he had done and all he had suffered
was the work of unforeseen, irresistible destiny. He had never intended
to do wrong. He had never thought it possible for him to commit one
dishonorable act. He had aspired to live a perfectly upright and
honorable life; to be a credit to the aged and widowed mother who had
lost all on earth but him, and whose hopes in age and sorrow were
centered on him; to be worthy of the noble girl who had given him her
priceless heart, in his poverty and privation.
He had labored and suffered to gain an education and a profession; he
had denied himself not only all the pleasures of youth, but all the
comforts of life; he had worn himself out with toil and want to this
end!
Then he had gone to the Isle of Storms as hotel clerk, not only to get
up his strength in the bracing sea air and better living of the seaside
resort, but to earn money enough to pay for his last college course.
Ah! If he could have foreseen the end of his fatal sojourn there!
He was lured into the downward path without seeing whither he was going.
He was expected to be polite and obliging to the guests of the house,
and he was willing and anxious to be so.
When his office duties were not pressing he was expected to join in any
amusement in which he might assist, and he was delighted to do so.
For courtesy, he would take a hand at a game of cards where one was
wanted to make up a party; for courtesy, he would take a glass of
champagne when invited to do so, and he never dreamed of danger until
destruction overtook him; never dreamed of wrong or danger until that
fatal night in September when he fell into the trap of a professional
gambler, and played and drank and drank and played, and drank again,
until he lost his reason, and staked money that was not his own, and
lost it to the gambler, who had been scheming for that very sum from
first to last of the game.
Was not that destiny? Forewritten, unforeseen, irresistible destiny?
So it seemed to the wretched youth, as, leaning over the steamer’s side,
gazing into the dark water of the bay, he reviewed the story.
And then he remembered his vain pleadings, with groans and tears, to the
obdurate gamester to return the embezzled money, if not as a
restitution, then as a loan, to be repaid with usurious interest, if it
took the loser’s whole life to do it.
Then, when all his prayers had been denied and derided, and the swindler
had left him alone with his anguish and despair, came the mad
desperation that seized him, and fired him with the thought that it
would be right to try the only means in his power to recover the
embezzled money—to take his pass-key and go to the swindler’s room in
the dead of the night, and withdraw the stolen sum from the thief’s
possession. And he recalled how he went on this perilous venture, and
succeeded in getting back the money, when a slight noise caused him to
look around, and he saw the gambler sitting up in bed and leveling a
pistol at his head; how instinctively he sprang upon the would-be
murderer and seized and turned his hand; how the pistol went off and
shot the gambler dead!
Was not this destiny? Forewritten, unforeseen, irresistible destiny? So
it seemed now to poor Harcourt in his unutterable misery.
Then passed before his mental vision his swift, instinctive action of
closing up the room within and escaping through the window, which shut
with a spring; the night alarm; the breaking into the room; the
discovery of the dead man, with his brains blown out, and the discharged
pistol in his stiffened hand; circumstantial evidence that convinced the
spectators then, and the coroner’s jury afterward, that the death of
Yelverton had been suicide. And then, when all seemed over, and the
secret of that tragedy buried in the conscience-stricken soul of
Harcourt only, came the accusation from the hidden witness, Hanson, who
had seen the whole drama through a knothole in a wooden partition that
divided his room from Yelverton’s.
Was not this destiny? Forewritten, unforeseen, irresistible destiny? So
it seemed to the doomed youth who reviewed the story.
And Hanson had demanded, as the price of his secrecy, nothing less than
the hand of Harcourt’s betrothed bride, and the connivance and
assistance of Harcourt in obtaining it by a treacherous plot; and
threatened that, in case these conditions should not be accepted, to
denounce the wretched clerk as the midnight robber and murderer, to
bring him to the gallows or to the State prison for life, and so to
wreck the lives of the two innocent and honorable women whom he loved
best on earth.
What could he do but accept the cruel, the crushing, the infernal terms
offered him? he asked himself.
Was not this destiny? Forewritten, unforeseen, irresistible destiny?
So Harcourt swore to himself, before high heaven, that it was; that he
could not have foreseen or prevented one step in that downward path to
perdition.
He was not responsible, he said to himself, for anything that had
happened; and yet he loathed himself as a wretch unfit to live. And how
Roma would loathe him when she should know that he had betrayed her into
the power of his rival for some unexplained reason! And what would his
mother think when she should be told that through his connivance and
assistance Roma Fronde had been entrapped into marrying Hanson when she
thought she was marrying Harcourt? And what would all his friends think
when they should hear the degrading truth? If his mother could be spared
the knowledge of his dishonor he thought he could bear the contumely of
all the rest of the world. If, for her own sake, she could be spared
this, which could only be a less sorrow and a less shame than his trial
for robbery and murder and his death on the gallows could be.
Oh, the poor, humiliated mother! Oh, the fair, forsaken bride! He had
sinned to save them both from shame and sorrow, and now he awoke, as
from a dream, to find that he had not saved them after all.
For what was Roma’s condition now? And what would Dorothy Harcourt’s be
soon.
Oh, the maddening conflict of emotion! Oh, the despairing confusion of
thought! Oh, the cruel fate that had brought him to this and compelled
him to live! Why could he not be annihilated? Where was the mercy of
Heaven?
He looked down on the waters of the bay. They were very dark and still,
and almost smooth enough to reflect the starlit sky.
“There is peace,” he murmured to himself; “peace, rest and oblivion. Why
should I not seek it, as a child seeks sleep? Oh, that I might sink to
sleep, and sleep forever!”
For a moment the insane temptation of the suicide overshadowed him. It
would be so easy, so very easy, for him to drop quietly over the
steamer’s side and find death and forgetfulness in the deep waters of
the Chesapeake. No one would see him sink. No one would miss him until
the next day. Even then no one would know but that he had got off the
boat at some of the landings where she stopped to put off or take on
passengers or freight. No one there would be sufficiently interested to
inquire what had become of him. In fact, no one there even knew his
name, or anything about him beyond the fact that he had been one of a
wedding party on that trip. They were now on the broadest part of the
bay. No one would ever find his body or know his fate. The opportunity
was there, the temptation strong.
Roma would not care anything about the mysterious fate of the missing
wretch who had entrapped her into marriage with his rival and her own
once rejected suitor. Only, perhaps, she would be better pleased to know
that he had met his well deserved punishment.
But his poor, widowed old mother! She would care. Worse than sorrow for
a dead son would be the torture of anxiety on account of a missing son
whose fate or condition was unknowable. He was her only child, her only
support, her only hope. Could he desert her in her age and destitution,
and leave her with a load of intense anxiety and horrible doubt added to
her burden of sorrow and poverty? Could he, dare he, bring this last and
bitterest anguish upon her?
No! no! no! Hard and ignoble as life must henceforth be to him, he must
bear it—bear it for fifty or sixty years to come, perhaps.
What right had he, indeed, to seek the repose of death, even if it
should be repose instead of eternal retribution? He, a sinner above all
sinners! Even though he felt that all he had done and all he had
suffered was the work of a forewritten fate, yet none the less did he
feel that he was this sinner above all sinners, with no right to repose
in death, no right to comfort in life.
Yet he must live and work without hope or heart in life or labor. He
must live and work, not to attain the honors he had dreamed of, longed
for, aspired to, and must finally have attained but for this fatal first
false step, which had precipitated him to perdition; not for these
brilliant hopes that formed his “Paradise Lost,” and never to be
“Regained”; not as an ardent student or teacher in the schools and
colleges, among the books and companions that he loved, and in the
atmosphere that was his higher life! Oh, no! He had forfeited all that.
He was unworthy of such companionship.
Should he dare to attempt to earn his living, and pay for his education,
as a teacher of boys?
Ah, no! He must live and work as a hard laborer in some dockyard or
depot, carrying heavy burdens, unfit to associate with the honest
workmen who had lived worthy lives; and he would deny himself everything
but the barest necessities of existence to keep his poor old mother in
the comforts of life so long as she should live.
This hard labor and hard living should be the self-inflicted “penal
servitude” which he felt that he deserved, and which he knew would have
been the lightest sentence for his deed which the law could have
imposed, and even lighter, as it did not include imprisonment.
To devote all his hard earnings to his aged mother’s benefit, and to go
to see her sometimes, to cheer and console her, should be his own only
comfort in his self-imposed expiation.
And he must begin this penal servitude in some city where he was not
known, so that he might keep the secret of his fall from her. She must
never know of his poverty, privations and hard labor. He would always
contrive to appear before her, on his visits, as a gentleman—however
unworthy the name—so long as she should live.
Afterward, when she should have finished her long pilgrimage on earth,
and passed away to join her beloved ones gone before, then——
Then, when there should remain no one to be distressed and degraded by
his crime, then he would discharge his hardened conscience of the
intolerable load it bore, and give himself up to justice, to be dealt
with according to law.
Not until then could he hope for peace.
At last he succeeded in marking out his future external life with
sufficient clearness of outline, but his internal life was strangely
distracted and confused. He felt himself to be “a sinner above all
sinners,” and at the same time the irresponsible victim of a chain of
circumstances, the work of irresistible destiny.
So deep was his mental abstraction from all surrounding things and
movements, that he knew not when the man at the wheel or the watch on
deck was relieved until a hand was laid on his shoulder, and a kindly
voice said:
“Young gentleman, you are looking very ill. Hadn’t you better go below
and turn in?”
It was the early morning watch who spoke to him, and he answered
wearily:
“I thank you. Yes, I think I will.”
And he rose slowly and went to his stateroom, and threw himself into the
lower berth. For some time he lay awake there, intently thinking,
intensely suffering, but with thought and emotion revolving still in the
same circle around the tragedy—the destiny of his life. At length the
body could bear no more, but succumbed to the exhaustion of many nights’
vigilance, and he sank into sleep, which was at first a fitful doze and
afterward a profound slumber, which lasted until noon the next day, when
he awoke to find the boat at Richmond.
Oh, that awakening! Oh, the agony of returning to life, to memory and to
misery, and to the revolving of thought and feeling around the destined
tragedy! Living it all over again, as if he were sentenced to do so
until death!
Without arranging his disordered hair or dress, he went up on deck,
looking so wild and haggard that one of the deck hands remarked to
another:
“That young fellow has been on a big drunk, and is paying for it now,
you bet.”
Harcourt had no intention of stopping in Richmond. He was too well known
in the Queen City of the South. He would go to the North, and lose his
identity in some large town where he had never been before.
New York City offered the largest human wilderness in which to lose
himself. He had never been there in his life, and had no acquaintances
there except the Bushes and that Belial, Hanson. Hanson was away, and
the Bushes would not be at all likely to discover him in changed
identity.
He would go to New York by the first boat.
He declined the breakfast offered him by the steward, gathered his
baggage and had it transferred to the New York boat, which was getting
up steam to start on her northward voyage. He sat on the deck, staring
off into vacancy, as the boat turned and steamed down the river.
“Young fellow getting over a long spree, I shouldn’t wonder,” remarked
one passenger to another, as they noticed the pallid skin, haggard
features and inflamed eyes of poor Harcourt.
He knew nothing of these comments, but sat there, gloomy and abstracted,
until he was aroused by a voice near him.
“How do you do, sir?” it said.
He looked up, dazed by the sudden and familiar address from a stranger.
“You don’t seem to recognize me.”
Harcourt gazed for a moment longer without speaking.
“Charles Cutts, don’t you know, who landed from a passing yacht at the
Isle of Storms late one night in September last—a night memorable for
the tragedy enacted there, you know,” said the stranger.
“I—remember—you—now,” Harcourt faltered, changing color from pallor to
green ghastliness.
“Ah! I see that the very sight of me, calling up the memory of that
night, has quite upset you, and I don’t wonder,” said Cutts, taking a
seat beside the agitated young man.
“I—I—have not been well lately—I—I have but recently recovered from a
very severe fit of illness,” faltered Harcourt, in explanation.
“Been ill? Indeed, you look as if you had been, poor fellow! I am sorry
for you. I ought not to have mentioned that dreadful occurrence that
drove even me away from the house,” said Cutts sympathetically.
And yet he went on speaking of it.
“I fled away from the scene of the so-called suicide the next morning.”
“The so-called suicide,” muttered Harcourt involuntarily.
“Yes; that was what they called it, you know.”
“The—the—coroner’s jury—after—after investigation—found it so,” said
Harcourt hoarsely.
“Oh, yes. Sharp fellows, that coroner’s jury. I need not have run away
from them, as I did by the very boat that went to fetch the coroner.”
“Did you—run away—from them?”
“Yes; for fear of being summoned as a witness. I did not want to, in the
case of that scoundrel Yelverton. I knew the fellow in Baltimore. The
world is well rid of him. I think so now, and thought so then. That was
the reason why I hurried off in the early boat that went to fetch the
coroner from Snowden, to avoid being summoned to give evidence.”
“But—but—your room was—at the opposite side—of the hotel. You could have
known nothing—of—of the manner of—Yelverton’s death,” said Harcourt,
speaking as with the difficulty and hesitancy of an expiring man.
“I know it was not a suicide,” said Cutts positively.
“Oh, my Lord!” exclaimed Harcourt, starting to his feet and gazing into
the stolid face of the speaker, who had also risen.
“I don’t wonder it upsets you. It did me, I know.”
“But it was proved beyond all doubt that Yelverton died by his own
hand,” said the young man, trying to rally his forces.
“Bosh! Proved to the satisfaction of the Snowden Dogberries who sat on
the coroner’s jury! But there, young man, I have already said more than
I ever intended to say to any mortal on that subject; only, you know,
the sudden sight of you here on the boat recalled the whole thing to my
mind.”
“But, pray tell me what reason you have for supposing——” began Harcourt,
but his tormentor cut him short.
“I will tell you, nor any one else, nothing. I will hold my tongue, so
help me Heaven, unless——”
“Unless what?” asked Harcourt.
“Unless ‘in the course of human events,’ as Thomas Jefferson said, some
innocent man should be charged with that very murder, as may happen, for
the verdict of a coroner’s jury is not necessarily and invariably final.
In such a case, to save the innocent, I would denounce the guilty.”
“You know the guilty one, then?” faltered Harcourt.
“I have said my last word on this subject, young man, and I am sorry for
having said any word about it. It is the first time; it shall be the
last, except in the exigency to which I have alluded. You, too, should
turn your thoughts to other matters. Exciting subjects are not good for
convalescents,” said Cutts, walking away to avoid further discussion of
the subject.
Harcourt felt stunned. He dropped back in his chair, scarcely able to
ask himself, much less answer to himself, the question, how much did
Cutts really know of that night’s tragedy; yet feeling sure of one
thing—that the Baltimore broker had no disposition to denounce him.
And between them the subject was never mentioned during the voyage.