boat-landing was presently thronged by Rivermouthians--men, women, and
children. The arrival of a United States vessel always stirred an
emotion in the town. Naval officers were prime favorites in
aristocratic circles, and there were few ships in the service that did
not count among their blue-jackets one or more men belonging to the
port. Thus all sea-worn mariners in Uncle Sam's employ were sure of
both patrician and democratic welcome at Rivermouth. But the present
ship contained an especially valuable cargo.
It was a patient and characteristically undemonstrative crowd that
assembled on the wharf, a crowd content to wait an hour or more without
a murmur after the ship had dropped anchor in midstream for the
captain's gig to be lowered from the davits. The shrill falsetto of the
boatswain's whistle suddenly informed those on shore of what was taking
place on the starboard side, and in a few minutes the gig came sweeping
across the blue water, with James Dutton seated in the stern-sheets and
looking very pale. He sat there, from time to time pulling his blond
mustache, evidently embarrassed. A cheer or two rose from the wharf
when the eight gleaming blades simultaneously stood upright in air, as
if the movement had been performed by some mechanism. The disembarkment
followed in dead silence, for the interest was too novel and too
intense to express itself noisily. Those nearest to James Dutton
pressed forward to shake hands with him, but this ceremony had to be
dispensed with as he hobbled on his crutches through the crowd, piloted
by Postmaster Mugridge to the hack which stood in waiting at the head
of the wharf.
Dutton was driven directly to his own little cottage in Nutter's Lane,
which had been put in order for his occupancy. The small grocery closet
had been filled with supplies, the fire had been lighted in the
diminutive kitchen stove, and the tea-kettle was twittering on top,
like a bird on a bough. The Twombly girls, Priscilla and Mehitabel, had
set some pansies and lilacs here and there in blue china mugs, and
decorated with greenery the faded daguerreotype of old Nehemiah Dutton,
which hung like a slowly dissolving ghost over his ancient shoemaker's
bench. As James Dutton hobbled into the contracted room where he had
spent the tedious years of his youth and manhood, he had to lift a hand
from one of the crutches to brush away the tears that blinded him. It
was so good to be at home again!
[Illustration with caption: Held an informal reception]
That afternoon, Dutton held an informal reception. There was a constant
coming and going of persons not in the habit of paying visits in so
unfashionable a neighborhood as Nutter's Lane. Now and then a townsman,
conscious that his unimportance did not warrant his unintroduced
presence inside, lounged carelessly by the door; and through the rest
of the day several small boys turned somersaults and skylarked under
the window, or sat in rows on the rail fence opposite the gate. Among
others came the Hon. Jedd Deane, with his most pronounced Websterian
air--he was always oscillating between the manner of Webster and that
of Rufus Choate--to pay his respects to James Dutton, which was
considered a great compliment indeed. A few days later, this statesman
invited Dutton to dine with him at the ancestral mansion in Mulberry
Avenue, in company with Parson Wibird Hawkins, Postmaster Mugridge, and
Silas Trefethen, the Collector of the Port. It was intimated that young
Dutton had handled himself under this ordeal with as much
self-possession and dignity as if he had always dined off colonial
china, and had always stirred his after-dinner coffee with a spoon
manufactured by Paul Revere.
A motion to give James Dutton a limited public banquet, at which the
politicians could have a chance to unfold their eloquence, was
discussed and approved by the Board of Selectmen, but subsequently laid
on the table, it being reported that Mr. Dutton had declared that he
would rather have his other leg blown off than make a speech. This
necessarily killed the project, for a reply from him to the chairman's
opening address was a sine qua non.
Life now opened up all sunshine to James Dutton. His personal
surroundings were of the humblest, but it was home, sweet, sweet home.
One may roam amid palaces--even amid the halls of the Montezumas--yet,
after all, one's own imperfect drain is the best. The very
leather-parings and bits of thread that had drifted from the work-bench
into the front yard, and seemed to have taken root there like some
strange exotic weed, were a delight to him. Dutton's inability to move
about as in former years sometimes irked him, but everything else was
pleasant. He resolved to make the best of this one misfortune, since
without it he would never have been treated with such kindness and
consideration. The constant employment he found at his trade helped him
to forget that he had not two legs. A man who is obliged to occupy a
cobbler's bench day after day has no special need of legs at all.
Everybody brought jobs to his door, and Dutton had as much work as he
could do. At times, indeed, he was forced to decline a commission. He
could hardly credit his senses when this occurred.
So life ran very smoothly with him. For the first time in his existence
he found himself humming or whistling an accompaniment to the
rat-tat-tat of his hammer on the sole-leather. No hour of the
twenty-four hung heavily on him. In the rear of the cottage was a bit
of ground, perhaps forty feet square, with an old elm in the centre,
under which Dutton liked to take his nooning. It was here he used to
play years ago, a quiet, dreamy lad, with no companions except the
squirrels. A family of them still inhabited the ancient boughs, and it
amused him to remember how he once believed that the nimble brown
creatures belonged to a tribe of dwarf Indians who might attempt to
scalp him with their little knives if they caught him out after dusk.
Though his childhood had not been happy, he had reached a bend in the
road where to pause and look back was to find the retrospect full of
fairy lights and coloring.
Almost every evening one or two old acquaintances, with whom he had not
been acquainted, dropped in to chat with him, mainly about the war. He
had shared in all the skirmishes and battles from Cerro Gordo and
Molino del Rey up to the capture of Chapultepec; and it was something
to hear of these matters from one who had been a part of what he saw.
It was considered a favor to be allowed to examine at short range that
medal "for bravery on the field of battle." It was a kind of honor
"just to heft it," as somebody said one night. There were visitors upon
whom the impression was strong that General Scott had made the medal
with his own hands.
James Dutton was ever modest in speaking of his single personal
exploit. He guessed he didn't know what he was doing at the moment when
he tumbled the howitzer into the ravine, from which the boys afterward
fished it out. "You see, things were anyway up on that plateau. The
copper bullets were flying like hailstones, so it didn't much matter
where a fellow went--he was sure to get peppered. Of course the captain
couldn't be left up there--we wanted him for morning parades. Then I
happened to see the little field-piece stranded among the chaparral. It
was a cursed nice little cannon. It would have been a blighting shame
to have lost it."
"I suppose you didn't leave your heart down there along with the
senoriteers, did you, Jemmy?" inquired a town Lovelace.
"No," said Dutton, always perfectly matter of fact; "I left my leg."
Ah, yes; life was very pleasant to him in those days!
Not only kindnesses, but honors were showered upon him. Parson Wibird
Hawkins, in the course of an address before the Rivermouth Historical
and Genealogical Society, that winter, paid an eloquent tribute to "the
glorious military career of our young townsman"--which was no more than
justice; for if a man who has had a limb shot off in battle has not had
a touch of glory, then war is an imposition. Whenever a distinguished
stranger visited the town, he was not let off without the question,
"Are you aware, sir, that we have among us one of the heroes of the
late Mexican war?" And then a stroll about town to the various points
of historic interest invariably ended at the unpretending doorstep of
Dutton's cottage.
At the celebration of the first Fourth of July following his return
from Mexico, James Dutton was pretty nearly, if not quite, the chief
feature of the procession, riding in an open barouche immediately
behind that of the Governor. The boys would have marched him all by
himself if it had been possible to form him into a hollow square. From
this day James Dutton, in his faded coat and battered artillery cap,
was held an indispensable adjunct to all turnouts of a warlike
complexion. Nor was his fame wholly local. Now and then, as time went
on, some old comrade of the Army of the Rio Grande, a member perhaps of
old Company K, would turn up in Rivermouth for no other apparent
purpose than to smoke a pipe or so with Button at his headquarters in
Nutter's Lane. If he sometimes chanced to furnish the caller with a
dollar or two of "the sinews of war," it was nobody's business. The
days on which these visits fell were red-letter days to James Dutton.
It was a proud moment when he found himself one afternoon sitting, at
Schoolmaster Grimshaw's invitation, on the platform in the
recitation-room of the Temple Grammar School--sitting on the very
platform with the green baize-covered table to which he had many a time
marched up sideways to take a feruling. Something of the old awe and
apprehension which Master Grimshaw used to inspire crept over him.
There were instants when Dutton would have abjectly held out his hand
if he had been told to do it. He had been invited to witness the
evolutions of the graduating class in history and oratory, and the
moisture gathered in his honest blue eyes when a panic-stricken urchin
faltered forth--
"We were not many, we who stood
Before the iron sleet that day."
Dutton listened to it all with unruffled gravity. There was never a
more gentle hero, or one with a slighter sense of humor, than the hero
of Chapultepec.
Dutton's lot was now so prosperous as to exclude any disturbing
thoughts concerning the future. The idea of applying for a pension
never entered his head until the subject was suggested to him by
Postmaster Mugridge, a more worldly man, an office-holder himself, with
a carefully peeled eye on Government patronage. Dutton then reflected
that perhaps a pension would be handy in his old age, when he could not
expect to work steadily at his trade, even if he were able to work at
all. He looked about him for somebody to manage the affair for him.
Lawyer Penhallow undertook the business with alacrity; but the alacrity
was all on his side, for there were thousands of yards of red tape to
be unrolled at Washington before anything in that sort could be done.
At that conservative stage of our national progress, it was not
possible for a man to obtain a pension simply because he happened to
know the brother of a man who knew another man that had intended to go
to the war, and didn't. Dutton's claims, too, were seriously
complicated by the fact that he had lost his discharge papers; so the
matter dragged, and was still dragging when it ceased to be of any
importance to anybody.
Whenever James Dutton glanced into the future, it was with a tranquil
mind. He pictured himself, should he not fall out of the ranks, a
white-haired, possibly a bald-headed old boy, sitting of summer
evenings on the doorstep of his shop, and telling stories to the
children--the children and grandchildren of his present associates and
friends. He would naturally have laid up something by that time;
besides, there was his pension. Meanwhile, though he moved in a humble
sphere, was not his lot an enviable one? There were long years of
pleasant existence to be passed through before he reached the period of
old age. Of course that would have its ailments and discomforts, but
its compensations, also. It seemed scarcely predictable that the years
to come held for him either great sorrows or great felicities: he would
never marry, and though he might have to grieve over a fallen comrade
here and there, his heart was not to be wrung by the possible death of
wife or child. With the tints of the present he painted his simple
future, and was content.
Sometimes the experiences of the last few years took on the semblance
of a haunting dream; those long marches through a land rich with
strange foliage and fruits, the enchanted Southern nights, the life in
camp, the roar of battle, and that one bewildering day on the heights
of Chapultepec--it all seemed phantasmagoric. But there was his
mutilation to assure him of the reality, and there on Anchor Street,
growing grayer and more wrinkled every season, stood the little
building where he had enlisted. To be sure, the shield was gone from
the transom, and the spiders had stretched their reticulated barricades
across the entrance; but whenever Dutton hobbled by the place, he could
almost see Sergeant O'Neil leaning in an insidious attitude against the
door-sill, and smoking his short clay pipe as of old. Yet as time
elapsed, this figure also grew indistinct and elusive, like the rest.
Possibly--but this is the merest conjecture, and has bearing only on a
later period--possibly it may have sometimes occurred to James Dutton,
in a vague way, that after all there had been something ironical and
sinister in his good fortune. The very circumstance that had lifted him
from his obscurity had shut him out from further usefulness in life;
his one success had defeated him; he was stranded, and could do no
more. If such a reflection ever came to him, no expression of it found
a way to his lips.
The weeks turned themselves into months, and the months into years.
Perhaps four years had passed by when clouds of a perceptible density
began to gather on James Dutton's bright horizon.
The wisest of poets has told us that custom dulls the edge of appetite.
One gets used to everything, even to heroes. James Dutton was beginning
to lose the bloom of his novelty. Indeed, he had already lost it. The
process had been so gradual, so subtile, in its working, that the final
result came upon him like something that had happened suddenly. But
this was not the fact. He might have seen it coming, if he had watched.
One by one his customers had drifted away from him; his shop was out of
the beaten track, and a fashionable boot and shoe establishment, newly
sprung up in the business part of the town, had quietly absorbed his
patrons. There was no conscious unkindness in this desertion.
Thoughtless neglect, all the more bitter by contrast, had followed
thoughtless admiration. Admiration and neglect are apt to hunt in
couples. Nearly all the customers left on Dutton's hands had resolved
themselves into two collateral classes, those who delayed and those who
forgot to pay. That unreached pension, which flitted like an ignis
fatuus the instant one got anywhere near it, would have been very handy
to have just then. The want of it had come long before old age. Dutton
was only twenty-nine. Yet he somehow seemed old. The indoor confinement
explained his pallor, but not the deepening lines that recently began
to spread themselves fan-like at the corners of his eyes.
Callers at Nutter's Lane had now become rare birds. The dwindling of
his visitors had at first scarcely attracted his notice; it had been so
gradual, like the rest. But at last Dutton found himself alone. The old
solitude of his youth had re-knitted its shell around him. Now that he
was unsustained by the likelihood of some one looking in on him, the
evenings, especially the winter evenings, were long to Dutton. Owing to
weak eyes, he was unable to read much, and then he was not naturally a
reader. He was too proud or too shy to seek the companionship which he
might have found at Meeks's drug-store. Moreover, the society there was
not of a kind that pleased him; it had not pleased him in the old days,
and now he saw how narrow and poor it was, having had a glimpse of the
broad world. The moonlight nights, when he could sit at the window, and
look out on the gleaming river and the objects on the farther shore,
were bearable. Something seemed always to be going on in the old
disused burying-ground; he was positive that on certain nights uncanny
figures flitted from dark to dark through a broad intervening belt of
silvery moonshine. A busy spot after all these years! But when it was
pitch-black outside, he had no resources. His work-bench with its
polished concave leather seat, the scanty furniture, and his father's
picture on the wall, grew hateful to him. At an hour when the social
life of the town was at its beginning, he would extinguish his
melancholy tallow-dip and go to bed, lying awake until long after all
the rest of the world slumbered. This lying awake soon became a habit.
The slightest sound broke his sleep--the gnawing of a mouse behind the
mopboard, or a change in the wind; and then insomnia seized upon him.
He lay there listening to the summer breeze among the elms, or to the
autumn winds that, sweeping up from the sea, teased his ear with
muffled accents of wrecked and drowning men.
The pay for the few jobs which came to him at this juncture was
insufficient to supply many of his simple wants. It was sometimes a
choice with him between food and fuel. When he was younger, he used to
get all the chips and kindling he wanted from Sherburn's shipyard,
three quarters of a mile away. But handicapped as he now was, it was
impossible for him to compass that distance over the slippery sidewalk
or through the drifted road-bed. During the particular winter here in
question, James Dutton was often cold, and oftener hungry--and nobody
suspected it.
A word in the ear of Parson Wibird Hawkins, or the Hon. Jedd Deane, or
any of the scores of kind-hearted townsfolk, would have changed the
situation. But to make known his distress, to appeal for charity, to
hold out his hand and be a pauper--that was not in him. From his point
of view, if he could have done that, he would not have been the man to
rescue his captain on the fiery plateau, and then go back through that
hell of musketry to get the mountain howitzer. He was secretly and
justly proud of saving his captain's life and of bringing off that
"cursed nice little cannon." He gloried over it many a time to himself,
and often of late took the medal of honor from its imitation-morocco
case, and read the inscription by the light of his flickering candle.
The embossed silver words seemed to spread a lambent glow over all the
squalid little cabin--seemed almost to set it on fire! More than once
some irrepressible small boy, prowling at night in the neighborhood and
drawn like a moth by the flame of Dutton's candle, had set his eye to a
crack in the door-panel and seen the shoemaker sitting on the edge of
his bed with the medal in his hand.
Until within a year or eighteen months, Dutton had regularly attended
the Sunday morning service at the Old Brick Church. One service was all
he could manage, for it was difficult for him to mount the steep
staircase leading to his seat in the gallery. That his attendance
slackened and finally ceased altogether, he tried, in his own mind, to
attribute to this difficulty, and not to the fact that his best suit
had become so threadbare as to make him ashamed; though the
congregation now seldom glanced up, as it used to do, at the organ-loft
where he sat separated from the choir by a low green curtain. Thus he
had on his hands the whole unemployed day, with no break in its
monotony; and it often seemed interminable. The Puritan Sabbath as it
then existed was not a thing to be trifled with. All temporal affairs
were sternly set aside; earth came to a standstill. Dutton, however,
conceived the plan of writing down in a little blank-book the events of
his life. The task would occupy and divert him, and be no flagrant sin.
But there had been no events in his life until the one great event; so
his autobiography resolved itself into a single line on the first page--
Sept. 13, 1847. Had my leg shot off.
What else was there to record, except a transient gleam of sunshine
immediately after his return home, and his present helplessness and
isolation?
It was one morning at the close of a particularly bitter December. The
river-shore was sheathed in thicker ice than had been known for twenty
years. The cold snap, with its freaks among water-pipes and
window-glass and straw-bedded roots in front gardens, was a thing that
was to be remembered and commented on for twenty years to come. All
natural phenomena have a curious attraction for persons who live in
small towns and villages. The weathercock on the spire and the
barometer on the back piazza are studied as they are not studied by
dwellers in cities. A habit of keen observation of trivial matters
becomes second nature in rural places. The provincial eye grows as
sharp as the woodsman's. Thus it happened that somebody passing
casually through Nutter's Lane that morning noticed--noticed it as a
thing of course, since it was so--that no smoke was coming out of
Dutton's chimney. The observer presently mentioned the fact at the
Brick Market up town, and some of the bystanders began wondering if
Dutton had overslept himself, or if he were under the weather. Nobody
recollected seeing him lately, and nobody recollected not seeing him; a
person so seldom in the street as Dutton is not soon missed. Dr. Meeks
concluded that he would look in at Nutter's Lane on the way home with
his marketing. The man who had remarked the absence of smoke had now a
blurred impression that the shutters of Dutton's shop-window had not
been taken down. It looked as if things were not quite right with him.
Two or three persons were going in Dr. Meeks's direction, so they
accompanied him, and turned into Nutter's Lane with the doctor.
The shop-shutters were still up, and no feather of smoke was curling
from the one chimney of Dutton's little house. Dr. Meeks rapped smartly
on the door without bringing a response. After waiting a moment he
knocked again, somewhat more heavily, but with like ill success. Then
he tried the latch. The door was bolted.
"I think the lad must be sick," said Dr. Meeks, glancing hurriedly over
his shoulder at his companions. "What shall we do?"
"I guess we'd better see if he is," said a man named Philbrick. "Let me
come there," and without further words Philbrick pressed his full
weight against the pine-wood panels. The rusty fastening gave way, and
the door flew open. Cold as it was without, a colder breath seemed to
issue from the interior. The door opened directly into the main
apartment, which was Dutton's shop and sleeping-place in one. It was a
lovely morning, and the sunshine, as if it had caught a glitter from
the floating points of ice on the river, poured in through a rear
window and flooded the room with gold. James Dutton was lying on his
pallet in the farther corner. He was dead. He must have been dead
several hours, perhaps two or three days. The medal lay on his breast,
from which his right hand had evidently slipped. The down-like frost on
the medal was so thick as to make it impossible to distinguish the
words--
"FOR BRAVERY ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE."