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.