JOHN CRAWFORD AND HIS NEPHEW--THE WRECK OF A WORKING MAN--THE EPISODE OF
THE COCK--THE EFFECT OF JOSEPHINE HARRIS'S LETTER, AND AN EXODUS.
In order to demonstrate more clearly the state of affairs before
existing at the house of John Crawford, and the effect really produced
by the missive (it might almost as well have been called a _missile_) of
Josephine Harris,--it will be necessary to change the point of view to
the big house on the hill, at a little before noon on that pleasant
Sunday of summer.
The back piazza of the house looked north and eastward over a slight
depression which might almost be called a valley, and then at the range
of hills rising behind and stretching downward on the other side almost
to the Mohawk. Nearer, it looked out upon an extensive garden, carefully
laid out and thriftily in growth with all the ground-fruits and
vegetables natural to the climate, at that time in full luxuriance.
Around the high board fences of the garden stood an almost endless
variety of fruit-trees, the cherry-trees at that moment literally red,
or black, or amber, as the case might be, with those delicious little
globules of pulpy fruit-flesh which seem like drops of fragrant
sweetness squeezed from the very heart of Nature. Among them stood apple
and pear-trees, each loaded with the growing fruit of that wonderful
fruit-season, in which the smile of God seemed resting broadly on the
whole American continent in the wealth and variety of its productions,
however his hand may have been smiting it with the desolations of
personal strife and bloodshed.
Digressions have become so common during the course of this narration,
that if the later ones are not excusable on the score of propriety, they
at least have that excuse which is held to be so important by the
lawyers and the statesmen--_precedent_. And having already sinned in
that regard, beyond any hope of forgiveness and almost beyond any
feeling of accountability for the erraticism of the pen--let us pause
here, under the reminder of those hanging fruits in John Crawford's
garden, to say that while perhaps no nation has ever before been so
cursed with an extended civil war as this once free and happy republic
during the past two years--yet no nation, plunged into any description
of conflict, has ever been so favored of Heaven with the means for
carrying it on and so delivered of Heaven from the dangers of famine and
pestilence which so often accompany the other affliction.
At no period in the history of any nation in the world, could the
statistics of that country exhibit the same amount of material wealth
and power of production as those shown by the loyal States of the
American Union at the moment of the breaking out of the Rebellion--the
capabilities of the seceding States being left entirely out of the
question. Private coffers and the vaults of our banks were alike full of
gold, which had been for years flowing in and amassing from the mines of
California and the favorable course of foreign exchanges. We had been
feeding the world, and at the same time supplying ourselves and the
world with more than half the precious metals yearly contributed to the
hoards of the nations; and that the country should literally have become
"full of money," was inevitable. But more especially did we hold power
over the whole world in our capacities for fruit-growing and in our
stores of breadstuffs already amassed. With proper management of our
resources, the latter fact alone might have made the whole world
tributary to us, and we could have dictated terms in war as well as in
peace.
When a certain young Lieutenant in the British naval service, from the
China fleet, crossed from Hong Kong to San Francisco on his way home on
leave, in 1861, and then came by the overland route from San Francisco
to New York, he fell into conversation in this city with a friend whom
he had known in England; and as there were then rumors of trouble with
Great Britain growing out of her expected help to the rebels, that
conversation very naturally turned towards the relative wealth and power
of the two countries.
"Well, I do hope," said the young English officer, "that there will not
be any trouble between the two countries, because we don't want to fight
you, you know!"
"And so do I," said his friend. "The _people_ of America do not bear any
ill will to the people or the government of England."
"But we should beat you if we _did_ fight, you know," pursued the
Englishman, with John Bull's tenacity of national pride.
"Think so?" asked the other, with the slightest suspicion of a sneer
upon his lip.
"Oh, no, I don't think anything about it--I _know_ it," said the
Englishman. "Why, you haven't got any navy."
"The deuce we haven't!" observed the other. "I guess you have not _seen_
our navy!"
"No!--nor has any one else seen an armament worthy of the name," said
the Englishman, of course supposing that he referred to the dozen of old
and worm-eaten wooden ships that then made up our whole preparation for
contesting the empire of the seas. "Why any one of our half dozen fleets
would eat up your whole navy in half an hour. If you had seen our Baltic
fleet reviewed at Spithead, as I did just at the close of the Crimean
war, you would know something of what the word 'navy' meant, and you
would also have some idea, you know, of what a chance you would have at
fighting England!"
"Humph! well, yes, you _have_ a pretty long string of vessels, such as
they are," said his American friend. "But I told you that you did not
know anything about _our_ navy, and you do not. You speak of the 'Baltic
fleet.' Now what will you say when I tell you that at one point on the
Mississippi we have a line of gun-boats that would knock not only your
Baltic fleet but all the rest of your fleets into smithereens, without
even firing a gun?"
"Why I should only say that you were crazy, as I think you _are_!" said
the Englishman, really expecting that his friend would by-and-bye
attempt to demonstrate that the easiest way of travelling was by walking
on the head instead of the feet.
"Yes, I daresay you do," said the American. "And yet I am _not_ crazy.
The only thing is that you do not yet understand me. The line of
gun-boats of which I speak, is a line of warehouses at Chicago,
containing at this moment from six to ten millions of bushels of grain,
constantly emptying and constantly being replenished. _That_ is the line
of gun-boats to fight the world, and we can conquer the world if we only
use them correctly. We can live within ourselves, without buying one
dollar's-worth of anything from any nation abroad, except possibly _tea_
(for we can make our own _coffee_ while we can grow _peas_ and _beans_);
and there is not another nation on the globe that can do the same. Not a
nation of you all but must have our breadstuffs or go hungry; and the
sailors of your 'Baltic fleet' would not fight well, I fancy, on empty
stomachs."
"Humph!" said the Englishman. "That is an odd view to take of war." But
he said no more, and was evidently thinking. He had grounds for thought,
and so had the whole world. We had the element of success in our own
hands, in the capacity of living within ourselves. Had our resources
been properly managed, the importation of all foreign goods prohibited
during the period of the war, and the exportation of gold and
breadstuffs forbidden and guarded against by the closest watch and the
most stringent penalties, with our people practicing the self-denial and
economy of the men and women of the Revolution, setting their
spinning-wheels and looms once more in motion and wearing home-spuns
instead of imported broadcloths and satins,--had these steps been taken,
as they should have been taken, starvation would have fallen upon half
Europe, and the rebellion would long before this time[15] have perished
from its own weakness or been crushed out, from sheer necessity, by the
European powers whose very existence its continuance was perilling.
[Footnote 15: March 7th, 1863.]
The smile of God has not been withdrawn from our fields and orchards; we
have been continued in national health and still supplied with all the
luxuries of production and abundance; and yet what is the use which we
have made of these immense advantages, and what thanks have we rendered
to the Supreme Being in those two most acceptable of worships, _labor_
and _success_, for the health and wealth thus given and continued?
But these reflections over, which have sprung from the fruit glistening
on the trees in John Crawford's garden, the course of this narration
reverts to two who occupied the back piazza of the mansion at that hour
of Sunday noon. The piazza was a broad one, old-fashioned like the
house, with pillars of locust, planed and cornered instead of being
turned or fluted in the more modern fashion. Both the ends and the side
for a considerable distance towards the centre, were enclosed by a low
railing _in pale_; and the western end had lattice-work extending to the
tops of the pillars, with the leaves and tendrils of a large grape-vine
that had been planted many years before at the corner, running over,
twisting and interlacing in the lattice, and making a pleasant
flickering shade of the summer sunshine on the floor of the piazza. A
few birds, not yet thoroughly exhausted by the noonday heat, were
chirping in the thick branches of the fruit-trees near, and the drowsy
hum and chirp of insect life made such a sleepy undertone as could not
fail to bring rest and quiet to any mind not preternaturally active. A
more charming place could not have been devised, for a half-dreamy and
lazy student of either sex to sit down in an easy chair with a pleasant
book, read and muse until the flickering of the sunshine and the shadows
on the floor began to be blended with the type of the page, and then
fall away to the lightest and happiest of slumbers.
There were two figures on the western end of the piazza, under the
shade of the grape-vine. The first was that of an old man, sitting in a
high-backed easy-chair, his feet upon a carpet-covered ottoman, leaning
back, and if not in physical slumber, at least in that inertia of the
mind which denotes failing physical faculties and marks a slumber more
complete than that of shut eyes and stertorous breathing. Apparently he
was very old, for his hair was thin and nearly white, as it showed from
beneath the colored silk handkerchief thrown loosely over the back of
his head; his skin had that shrivelled and wrinkled appearance, denoting
that the life-fluids had been exhausted beneath it; his eyes, when
opened, had that white opacity more melancholy than apparent blindness,
because it shows a sight which after all takes in and recognizes
nothing; and his thin lips had that constant tremulous motion which
indicates a continual desire to speak, with scarcely the power of doing
so and with little more than the remnants of a mind left to dictate what
shall be uttered. John Crawford was, in short, a miserable human wreck,
all its pride, beauty and power shorn and swept away, and drifting
helplessly on to that lee-shore which is called death.
There was one peculiar feature of his situation which has not yet been
named, and yet it was the most noticeable of all connected with him.
From head to foot, sleeping or waking, at all times and under all
circumstances, his nervous system was shaking and shivering, keeping the
head in that continual quiver which is so melancholy to behold because
it suggests involuntary labor that must exhaust and wear out the system,
and making the weak hand so ungovernable that even the cup of tea put to
his mouth required to be held and guided by others to prevent the
contents being spilled and the vessel falling to the floor. Nothing
could be more pitiable, when watched for a considerable time and when
the impression forced itself upon the observer that at no single moment
would that tremor ever grow still until the spoiler had completed his
work, and the limbs should stiffen and straighten in the last chill of
mortality.
And yet John Crawford was really by no means the very old man indicated
by his white hairs, his dimmed eyes and his palsied shiverings. He was
very little past sixty, and at an age when under ordinary circumstances
several years of pleasant life might have been calculated upon. Nor was
he the victim of constitutional disease, which had been fought and
combatted until it had at last triumphed and brought down the torn
banner of manhood trailing in the dust. And still less had a life of
early indulgence and evil courses laid the mine for this
after-destruction. He was not old to senility; he belonged to a family
that had been noted for their long life, continued vigor and freedom
from hereditary disease; and he had carefully avoided those errors in
drink, food and personal indulgence which open the doors of life's
citadel to the invader from beyond the dark valley. What, then, was the
fatal secret? John Crawford was a suicide, and he had chosen a
peculiarly American mode of self-immolation. Or perhaps it may with more
propriety be said that he was a Faust in ordinary life, and that he had
called upon a national demon to be his aid and his foe. He had _worked
himself to death_--a phrase by many supposed to be hollow and unmeaning,
but one too sadly illustrated every day in our modern life.
Born wealthy, he seemed to have imbibed with his earliest breath the
impression that he was comparatively poor, and that only the most
laborious drudgery of mind and body, to which the toil of the slave in
the cotton-field is little more than play, could keep him from becoming
still poorer. He had been a miser at once of his pennies and his hours,
when a boy; and as he had grown older he had become a still worse miser
in every opportunity for gain, and a reckless spendthrift of his own
comfort and energy. No laborer on his farm had worked so many hours or
so laboriously, the impression having seemed all the while to abide with
him that if _he_ did not labor he would have only eye-service, and
nothing would be left him. When others had slept, and he had been
debarred from laboring with his hands, he had still toiled with his
brain, turning restlessly on his bed when he should have slept, and
planning to make his fertile acres still more productive or to add to
them others that lay in tempting proximity. When hours of relaxation had
been demanded by the calls of friendship, and even by the inexorable
demands of his own system, he had shut his ears and refused, as if
putting behind his back some tempter of the soul. Friends had said to
him: "John, you are killing yourself!" or "John, you are working too
hard and too steadily! Some day you will pay for all this." And one day
a blunt-spoken rustic neighbor, observing him at his toil early and
late, had said: "John Crawford, you are a fool! You do too much work!
You have a fine constitution, and think that you can take liberties with
it; but some day it will pay you, mark my words! You will find yourself,
one fine morning, doubled up like an old horse that has been
over-driven; and that will be the end of _you_! But go on, if you like
it!"
John Crawford _had_ "gone on." He had married very late in life,
principally on account of his belief that no man should marry until he
had done his life-work and placed himself beyond anxiety on the score of
property. When the day of his marriage came, after an engagement of
nearly ten years, people had long been saying that the woman of his
choice, his "Mary," had already worried away the best part of her life
in anxiety for him and in fears for the final prevention of their union.
Then, when the marriage was finally consummated and those who loved him
best hoped that he would relax in his life-wearing toil, he had merely
commenced to work the harder, because a married man needed to be better
circumstanced than a single one! And when, five or six years after his
marriage, and after giving birth to his one daughter and only child,
Mary, his wife died, he had gone to work still harder, it seemed, as the
only means of forgetting his bereavement! Rain or shine--early and
late--year after year, he had labored on, enriching his lands and
increasing his outbuildings, adding new acres and putting a few more
thousands to those already out at interest on good bond-and-mortgage.
One day--some two years before the date of this story--the crash had
come. The "old horse" had "doubled up." John Crawford had not come down
to breakfast at his usual time, and those who went up to look after him
had first discovered what ruin could do in a single night. The hale man
of the night before had become a partial paralytic, helpless from that
day forward--never again to lift hand in any employment, and scarcely
permitted brain enough to realize all that he had won and all that he
had lost. Gradually, afterwards, his mind had cleared and his speech
returned, though feebly; but during all the two years his nervous
prostration had been increasing and his bodily strength declining, until
for weeks before that Sunday of July the physicians had pronounced him
gradually dying and expected him to drop away at any moment.
Such was half the picture presented at the end of the piazza, the other
half being made up of Colonel Egbert Crawford, his military coat changed
to a blouse of brown linen and his boots replaced by a pair of
embroidered slippers, but in all other regards quite as we have before
seen him, and altogether the legitimate commander of the Two Hundredth
Volunteers. During all his late visits to the farm, and especially since
the defection and ostracism of Richard, he had made his "strong point"
in paying great attention to the infirm old gentleman; and as personal
attention is always pleasant and flattering, and more particularly so to
the old, crippled, tedious and tiresome, he had succeeded in winning a
place in the old man's regard, by this course, which he might have
failed to secure by any other means.
On this particular morning he was rather well pleased than otherwise to
see Mary throw on her flat and run out to make a call on some one of the
neighbors, as this gave him an opportunity, on this his last day of
probation, of making himself very devoted to his prospective
father-in-law, without any serious drain upon his own personal comfort
and energy. To wait upon the old man, after he had been got up and
dressed for the morning and assisted out to the cool piazza, as in this
instance--consisted of very little more than answering the few words
which the invalid might happen to address him (and they were likely to
be very few),--brushing away a troublesome fly when the old man sunk
into a doze and the pest came too near his nose,--moving him a little if
the sun happened to become troublesome through the vines,--or picking up
and restoring a dropped handkerchief. The Colonel was rather well
pleased to have something to employ him in this manner on this
particular morning, especially when he could combine the employment
with a book and a lounge with his feet upon the piazza-railing; for the
house was a little ticklish for indiscriminate roaming about, owing to
the arrangements which he knew to be in progress. The dare-devil Major
Lally, of the French revolutionary time, is said to have laid his head
upon the block with many doubts as to the grace of his position, and
with an apology to the executioner if he should have happened to
transgress any of the rules of mortuary good-breeding,--on the ground
that "he never had had his head cut off before;" and Colonel Egbert
Crawford, never having been married before, may be excused if he had
some sort of indefinite impression that all the rooms in the house were
full of awful preparations, liable to be run against at any moment, and
altogether fatal to matrimonial prospects if accidentally disturbed. So
the piazza and the old man furnished him with a means of killing time
that was "devilish dull," and at the same time with a certainty of being
kept in a place where he could not possibly "run foul of anything" or do
any harm.
The old man had scarcely spoken for half an hour. He had been lulled by
the drowsy sounds of the summer noon, and by the growing listlessness of
his own nature, into a few moments of doze, in which the Colonel,
closing his eyes to the pages of his book, seemed on the point of
joining him. Suddenly a rooster, that had strolled around from the
barnyard and flown up to a cool location on the top of the garden fence,
and under the shade of one of the cherry-trees (at which elevation no
doubt his numerous harem in the yard regarded him with the same reverent
respect paid to the Prophet Brigham, when at a distance, by his
fifty-six wives and a fraction)--suddenly this rooster, forgetting the
proprieties of the place and the hour, lazily flapped his big wings and
emitted a crow of such magnificent dimensions as might have startled the
whole neighborhood. Colonel Egbert Crawford started and opened his eyes:
the old man straightened up his shaking head and did likewise. The sound
was like an icy sword-blade thrust into a slumbering and tepid
fountain--startling all the water spirits from repose and propriety,--or
like Christmas suddenly obtruded, keen and pure, into the sluggish rest
of midsummer. Of what the old man mused as his waking thoughts
recognized the sound, can never be known--possibly of the wealth which
he had garnered and of the broad lands over which that sound went
ringing--all his own, but his own in what miserable mockery! Of what
Colonel Egbert Crawford thought when the sound smote his ears, is much
more certain. The cock-crow and _betrayal_! He had been brought up in
the country, and many a time, in his younger and better days, when
intercourse with the world had not yet developed the evil germ in his
character, he had read and pondered over the mysterious connection
between the cock, Shakspeare's "bird of dawning," and the scenes which
preceded the Crucifixion. Remembering that the cock had seemed to appear
and speak as the accuser of Peter, he had insensibly come to connect
those events with the blacker guilt of Iscariot, and to look upon the
bird as the watcher and detecter. In olden days this had not troubled
him: perhaps it would not have done so, only four or five months before,
when his hands were so much nearer stainless than they could be called
at that hour. Now, on the verge of his marriage, and when the double
tree of murder that he had planted (murder of character and murder of
person!) was about bearing welcome and triumphant fruit, the rooster's
cry, so sharp, sudden and unexpected, came to him like the voice of an
accusing spirit. It may be taken as a proof of his cowardice when we say
that momentarily his cheek whitened and his limbs trembled; and perhaps
every criminal is a coward, because he dares not do right and trust the
event with the overruling providences. But Egbert Crawford was no
_physical_ coward, as we may have occasion to know before we have closed
this relation. Yet he did whiten, and he did tremble. Was there
something ominous in this sudden disturbance of the Sabbath quiet? Did
it foreshadow another and a more startling disturbance, through which
the dark, silent current of the river of guilt would be splashed into by
the falling stones of the temple of error overhanging it? Was there in
it an omen of the sudden flash of a bright and unendurable light through
those black caverns, hitherto supposed to be impenetrable, where crawl
the loathsome and slimy reptiles of deceit and treachery?
Pshaw! why should there be anything of this involved? Cocks had crowed
before, even at noon-tide in summer, and the world had outlived the
omen! Nevertheless the sound, especially so loud and grating a one, in
which the bray of the donkey was so evenly mixed with the hideous scream
of the peacock before rain, was an inopportune and impudent one; and the
Colonel would have been very likely to wring chanticleer's neck if it
had happened to come within the clutch of his fingers. As it was, he
determined to cause an immediate abandonment of that stronghold, and
sprung up to look for a club or a stone with which the enemy could be
dislodged; when the rooster espying danger afar off, evacuated his
Manassas before the enemy could reach him, and went back to his cackling
harem. To them he no doubt related, in the appropriate language of the
bipeds _with_ feathers, what a couple of sleepy-heads he had seen upon
the piazza, and how he had startled them both with a voluntary upon his
private organ. Meanwhile the Colonel had dropped back into his seat.
But old John Crawford, fully awakened by the sound, did not seem likely
to fall away into slumber again. As Egbert resumed his place in the
chair, the old man said, feebly:
"Egbert."
Instantly the Colonel, never forgetting his cue of attention to the
invalid, drew closer to his side.
"Yes, Uncle, what can I do for you?"
"Where is Mary?" asked the old man, who had probably before asked the
question half a dozen times since she had left the house.
"Gone out for a walk, Uncle," said the expectant son-in-law. "I suppose
she is calling upon some of the neighbors. It is her last day, you know,
Uncle."
"Her last day?--yes, you are going to be married to-night. I know,"
whispered the old man, with the air of a child to whom the intelligence
has been communicated as a great secret--not that of a father who had
thus willed for the happiness of a dear child.
"Domine Rodgers is to come at six," said the Colonel. "And then I hope I
shall have the pleasure of calling you by a dearer name than that of
Uncle."
"Yes, yes--Mary is a good girl," said the old man. "Take good care of
her, Egbert. I am afraid I shan't live long, myself--not many
years"--(Poor old man!--no efforts had been sufficient to awake him to
the fact that his remaining time on the earth was probably to be
measured by days or hours instead of years!) "I am going to have my will
made, Egbert, the moment you are married, and I am going to leave all my
property to her--_her_--her and you. You will have it all. Don't waste
it, and don't let it go out of the family--not out of the family,
Egbert! You are a Crawford, and I want to keep the property in the
family. Eh, Egbert?"
"I will _try_ to do everything that you wish, Uncle!" said the Colonel;
and no doubt that he really meant to obey that portion of his Uncle's
injunctions--to _keep the property in the family_.
"And look here, Egbert," said the old man, who seemed to speak with less
difficulty than was usual to him, though there were hindrances in his
delivery very painful to the hearer and which we cannot caricature age
and decrepitude by attempting to convey. "Look here--there is one thing
more. Not a dollar to that scoundrel, Richard!--not a dollar, if he
starves!"
"Not a dollar, Uncle; I promise you this, solemnly." And this promise,
too, he meant to keep, beyond a question.
"And, Egbert, keep Mary away from him. Don't let him even see her if you
can avoid it. They used to be together a great deal, and I don't know--I
don't know!" What the old man did not know, must remain among the other
mysteries not yet to be revealed. "Keep her away from him--don't let her
go near him."
Though there were words in this last sentence of his Uncle's which did
not entirely please the Colonel, yet there were others which did please
him thoroughly. He made the third promise with the same alacrity. How
easy the old man was making his path! To keep the property in the family
(that meant, to keep it himself!) to give Richard no part of it under
any circumstances (a thing not very likely)--and to keep his young wife
from the presence of a man from whom he had only won her by the basest
falsehood (a thing he was certain to do at all events)--these were the
three injunctions: how easy to fulfil! The cup of the young man's
content was at that moment brimming over, and the impudent chanticleer
who only five minutes before had tortured him from the garden palings,
was quite forgotten.
Just then there was a light foot-fall on the piazza behind the two
speakers. The dulled senses of John Crawford were too dim to recognize
it, but the keener faculties of the Colonel heard the beat of the little
foot at once and knew it to be Mary's. He was just opening his mouth to
say to his uncle, "Here is Mary, now!" when he caught a glimpse of her
face; and then he remained gazing and said nothing. Mary had returned
from her walk, had thrown off her bonnet, and stepped out to the piazza
to look after the comfort of her father, and perhaps for some other
purpose. She was at that moment just outside the door, and from the
position of the Colonel, framed between the pillars at the other end of
the piazza and against the dark green foliage of an arborvitae standing
beyond. What was it that the quick eye of the Colonel saw, as he turned,
that stopped the words upon his lips and made him look in silence on the
young girl's face and figure? She had been absent from the house less
than an hour--what could have occurred to her, within that space of
time, to change their relative positions? And yet their relative
positions _were_ changed--he felt the truth in an instant. He had parted
with her less than two hours before--he the successful deceiver and she
the blind victim. They met again, and she had gone beyond his power and
his knowledge. We have often before had occasion, in the course of this
narration, to speak of sudden changes in the human face and demeanor, so
marked as to be absolutely startling. None of those changes could have
been more marked than that shown by the face and figure of this young
girl, as glanced at by the practiced eye of this man of the world. She
looked taller, straighter in form, and no longer drooping and inelastic.
Her glorious auburn hair was partially shaken loose from its
confinement, as it had become during the exciting interview with
Josephine Harris; and while the negligence added to the charm of her
appearance, the very fact that she had not displayed a woman's coquetry
in smoothing it rapidly into order before the glass when she threw off
her bonnet, betrayed that she was much more awake and excited than
usual. Was this on account of the near approach of the hour of her
marriage? Egbert Crawford scarcely thought so, for the eye was not that
of an expectant bride. That soft, sweet hazel eye still looked sad and
troubled, but there seemed to be a spark of something fiercer and
sharper than love, amid the trouble. Once more, what was it? Never
before had she seemed so handsome, but never so unapproachable; and if
the unscrupulous man had really held a true sentiment of love for her,
at the bottom of all his selfish and evil designs (and who shall say
that he had _not_?) there came the sharpest and deepest pang of his life
in the first awakening of the thought that she was _slipping away from
him_ even at the moment when he had apparently clutched her.
The Colonel, thoroughly mystified and a little alarmed, rose from his
seat and was advancing towards the young girl, when she moved a pace
towards him, her eyes first downcast and then even sternly raised to his
face. She did not call him by name, nor wait until he had so addressed
her, but held close to him, as if to avoid any possible observation, a
small sealed note--and said, her voice trembling and husky:
"A private note for you. Please read it at once."
Passing by him without another word and without waiting for any reply,
she advanced towards the end of the piazza where her father was sitting,
and knelt down beside him. Colonel Egbert Crawford noted every feature
of the movement, and saw that his fancy of the change in her appearance
was not fancy alone. There _was_ something threatening. Mechanically he
had taken the note as she had handed it to him and passed by. He glanced
at the superscription, and though his wonder was increased, his fears of
a rupture with Mary were partially dissipated, for the hand was totally
unknown to him. Ha! he had it! The hand-writing on the note was that of
a woman--the note had come to the house for him--she had seen it and
conceived a sudden spasm of jealousy on account of it! How easily he
could dissipate that idea by showing her the note, which he was certain
could not be from any illicit female correspondent who had brought him
within her power. The note was almost certain to be from some lady on
professional business, or from the wife, sister or mother of some
recruit who had enlisted in the famous Two Hundredth, asking for his
influence towards a discharge or a furlough. He would show her the note
at once, after he had read it, and with some kind of laughing excuse for
showing it which would not betray the fact that he knew of her having
any interest in it; and then this sudden but not dangerous hurricane
would be over.
He glanced round at the pair on the end of the piazza, a smile of
triumph on his face, as he came to this conclusion. Mary was kneeling
beside her father, her back towards himself, fondling the old man's poor
withered face, and paying so little attention to the man so soon to be
her husband, that the jealousy hypothesis might have seemed well
supported. What was it that the little girl had said to Josephine
Harris, not half an hour before?--that "she could never meet Egbert
Crawford after such a revelation?" Something of the kind, certainly. And
she had met him, and unconsciously and without calculation gone through
the very-brief interview in a manner worthy of the most finished
actress--say of _La Heron, La Hoey_ or _La Bateman_, to name three of
the most dissimilar but ablest representatives of dramatic character on
the American stage. Oh, these little women, who make a boast of their
weakness--there is very little that they cannot do when brought to the
test!
Colonel Egbert Crawford tore open the note, walking towards the upper or
eastern end of the piazza as he did so. His back was towards the two on
the other end, and perhaps it was well that he should have been so
positioned at that moment. Naturally, he glanced first at the bottom,
and saw a name which he immediately recognized as that of one who had
been _in the way_ sometimes at the Crawfords. He had never liked her, or
held any more intercourse with her than was unavoidable with a very
frequent guest at the same house with himself. He had considered her a
little loud in voice, rather rapid, and a _fool_. He had been satisfied
that she told all that she knew, and he would not have been surprised to
find that sometimes she told considerably more. He had considered her
utterly incapable of keen research, and the very last person in the
world to keep a secret, supposing that such a thing could come into her
possession. What did he find here, and from her?
He read that note three times over, standing on the extreme east end of
the piazza, leaning against the corner-board of the house, and with his
face so averted from those at the other end that even if Mary Crawford
once or twice threw a quick glance around, she could see nothing. Then
he turned, shoving the letter into his vest-pocket as he did so, and
walked slowly down the piazza to the hall-door, his face calm, to all
distant appearance, and whistling "_Strida la Vampa_."
If Mary Crawford had not before been able to see his movements, she arose
from her knees as he came down the piazza, and saw him _then_. She saw him
as he passed in at the hall-door, heard him whistle without an apparent
tremor in a note, and heard his slippered steps as he slowly lounged up
the stair towards the room on the second floor which had been for some
months kept as his. The young girl was disappointed--astonished--astounded!
She had seen no agitation--had heard and seen the indications of the
opposite! The blow had not been effectual--it had either been feebly
struck or delivered from a false aim! He was not guilty, or he was beyond
fear and knew himself to be beyond the reach of public exposure! She had
hoped too soon--the bond she dreaded was not broken or even deferred;
and God help her, after all!
Such were the impressions of the young girl, as the man within a few
hours to be her husband disappeared into the hall. Were they well
founded? Ah, young eyes!--you may be schooled to do your part, very
early, but you cannot at once be schooled to read the eyes of others
aright. Perhaps you _never_ learn to read aright, until you lose the
brightness of your own truth and beauty. Seventeen cannot well realize,
to-night at Mrs. Pearl Dowlas's hop, when Mr. Pearl Dowlas, the eminent
merchant, supposed to be worth a million, caresses his handsome
side-whiskers with his faultless hand and interchanges pleasant nothings
with the fashionable women who all admire him and all hate his
wife,--that Mr. Pearl Dowlas is suffering, all the while, the intense
agonies of ruin, and that he has the revolver already loaded and capped
with which he intends to blow out his brains after the last carriage has
rolled away. And Seventeen will be quite as slow to discover, unless
Seventeen has lived too fast for her own self-respect and eventual
happiness, that Lady Flora, patting her white-gloved hands to-night at
the Opera, with the blonde Emperor by her side, apparently the happiest
and the most truly envied woman in all that brilliant house, has such
pangs of rage and jealousy tugging at her heart-strings, when she looks
over at a much plainer woman in the opposite row of boxes, that could
the terror of the law be removed, she would sacrifice self-respect,
dignity, hope, everything, and bury a knife in the heart of that plainer
woman as they brush by each other in the lobby. Seventeen will be slow
to discover these things. Twenty-five may have a nearer appreciation of
them, though yet dim as compared with the reality alas!--it needs
Forty-five or Fifty, or a younger age made so old by sad
experience--Forty-five or Fifty, with the bloom gone, the gray hair here
and the wrinkles coming, to look beneath the surface and see the agony
writhing at the bottom. Thank God that some agonies never can be
discovered at all, until they break forth in uncontrollable madness: the
world might be sadder if we _could_ look in through transparent flesh
into our neighbors' hearts, as we do through glass windows into their
houses!
"_Strida la Vampa_" had been bravely whistled. Not braver the conduct of
the poor cartman at the hospital a few months ago, when he looked calmly
on without a groan or a wince, while the surgeon sawed off the ends of
the bone of his fractured arm, drilled holes through them and screwed
them together with a fastening of gold wire! That was physical bravery,
or perhaps stolid exemption from pain: this was that moral bravery, in a
bad cause, but none the less real, which could see wholesale and
undeniable ruin fall without betraying one sign of agony to the observer
most interested. Though he had read that letter three times to fix the
words in his mind, he had understood it at the first reading. It told
him all that needed to be known. Mary's changed look and her averted
face were now accounted for--accounted for at once and forever. No word
of explanation was necessary and none would be given or demanded. Some
men might have hesitated, and questioned whether the blow could not be
softened or averted. This was not Egbert Crawford. He had played,
boldly, wickedly and recklessly, though apparently with all care. At the
very moment when he seemed to have won all, he had lost all. At the bar
he had always been known as contesting a case unscrupulously and to the
bitter end, but as giving up gracefully and bearing a defeat without
complaint, _when_ defeated. A suspicion once aroused, and backed as was
_this_ suspicion, the wearer of the eyes he had just seen could never
again be deceived. Had he been less of a resolute man he might have
dared the other threats of the young girl, perhaps impotent. But the one
great stake lost, in the hand and fortune of Mary Crawford, there was
nothing left to play for, worth even hazarding exposure.
We will not say that in his own chamber, and while changing his slippers
for boots and his linen-wrapper to a coat more fit for the street, he
did not more than once gnash his teeth, utter an oath below his breath,
and curse the whole race of meddling women. But if he did so, he said
nothing aloud; and if his dark brows were darker than usual, no human
eye saw them. He had writing materials upon the table in that
room--_that room_, the best in the house, and into which, on the night
to follow, he had expected to be accompanied by _his bride_. He sat down
at the table but a moment, but in that moment he dashed off, with a hand
wonderfully steady under the circumstances, the following note:
SUNDAY, 1 P.M.
_Miss Harris_:--
You have meddled successfully, and whether you are right or wrong in
what you allege, I shall not be here to contest the question. If your
husband, if you ever get one, keeps half as close a watch over you,
he will probably see quite enough to satisfy him. Perhaps you will be
kind enough to communicate _this_ to Miss Mary Crawford, and thus
finish the obligations under which I rest.
Yours, humbly,
EGBERT CRAWFORD.
In a moment more this note was sealed and directed to "Miss Josephine
Harris--Care of Miss Crawford" and left lying on the table, with the
superscription upward. Then Colonel Egbert Crawford put on his hat,
walked deliberately down-stairs and out at the front of the house. No
one seemed to observe him--not even a domestic, and probably nothing
would have pleased him better at that moment. Walking down the lane to
the road, he turned up the road to the left, went up to a little country
tavern where he had sometimes hired a riding-horse on previous visits,
and hired a horse and buggy, with a driver, to go at once to Utica. Ten
minutes completed the negotiation, and ten more harnessed up the horse
to the vehicle; so that before the call to dinner was made at the
Crawford mansion, before old John Crawford was assisted in from the
portico, or Mary thought of the arbiter of her destiny as elsewhere than
in his own room,--he was bowling down the dusty road towards Utica. When
the down-train from Suspension Bridge left Utica for Albany that
afternoon, the detected and beaten gambler in reputations, lives and
matrimonial ventures, was a passenger.