BEFORE AND AFTER GETTYSBURGH--THE APATHY AND DESPAIR WHICH
PRECEDED, AND THE JUBILATION WHICH FOLLOWED--WHAT KITTY HOOD
SAID AFTER THE BATTLE, AND WHAT ROBERT BRAND--BROTHER AND
SISTER--A GUEST AT THE FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL--A FIRE-ROOM
VISIT, AN INTERVIEW, AND A DEPARTURE FOR EUROPE.
It was a dark day for the nation--perhaps none darker!--that day of late
June, 1863, marked by the occurrence of the preceding events. Private
interests, private wrongs, private sorrows seemed all to be culminating or
laying down fearful material for culmination in the future; but those
domestic convulsions were only a faint and feeble type of that great throe
agitating the whole nation. That day the bravest feared, not for themselves
but for the country they loved; and that day the miserable trucklers who
would long before have had the republic veil its face and sink on its knees
before the arrogance of rebellion, begging for "peace" with dishonor,
instead of demanding and enforcing victory,--that day they experienced such
a triumph as they had never before known and such as their narrow souls
could scarcely appreciate. "We told you so!" rung out from the throat of
every "conditional loyalist," as the same paltry exultation had rung many
an age before against the unsubmitting tribunes by the mad populace when
the Volscians threatened to devastate Rome--as it had been yelled into the
ears of Philip Van Artevelde and his brother defenders, when Ypres and
Bruges fell, and the fierce Earl of Flanders promised death to the burghers
of Ghent; and there was little, except bald defiance, that loyal men could
reply. That long-boasted "invasion of the North" had come at last; and
there is always a disheartening effect in the drawing of war nearer to the
doors it has heretofore spared, even as there is always a scum among any
population, ready to cry "ruin!" and counsel "submission" or "compromise"
when a single move in the great game of war has ended disastrously.
A more dreary spectacle than Philadelphia presented during some of the days
of that week, cannot very well be imagined. From Harrisburgh and many of
the minor towns of the west and southwest of the State, the inhabitants had
fled by thousands to other places supposed to be less easily within reach
of the enemy; and, if in a future day of peace those who at this juncture
took part with the rebellion should chance to be shamed with a reminder of
the panic in Richmond, and the removal of the Confederate archives, after
Hanover Court-House in 1862, they may very pleasantly retaliate by calling
up the panic at Harrisburgh and the packing up of the Pennsylvania State
records, after York and Carlisle in 1863. Hundreds of wealthy persons
removed their valuables even to Philadelphia; and there is no guarantee
whatever that many of them did not make a still further removal East, when
they could do so without attracting disagreeable attention and running the
chance of after ridicule.
There seemed to be an impression just then, in fact, that there was no
power whatever to check the disciplined but half-starved and desperate
rebel hordes. Even those who did not view the affair as any matter of gloom
or discouragement, still believed it one of heavy loss that must be
submitted to with the best grace possible.
One of the young Philadelphia merchants was recognized by a friend, on one
of the very last days of June, knocking about the balls in the
billiard-room of the Cattskill Mountain House, and questioned by him as to
the propriety of his being away from the Quaker City at a time when so
heavy a misfortune as the rebel advance to the Delaware seemed to be
impending.
"Oh," said the merchant, making an eight-shot at the same moment, "I do not
see any good that I could do by staying."
"And do you not believe that the rebels will reach Philadelphia?" asked the
friend.
"Well, yes, I rather think they will," answered the nonchalant. "I should
not be surprised if they should reach there to-morrow. In fact I
telegraphed to my partner from Albany, yesterday, whenever they had taken
Harrisburgh to pack up the most valuable of our goods and send them to New
York."
"And when they have taken New York?" asked the interrogator, not a little
amused at that new system of defending valuable property and the country.
"Oh," said the merchant, as he sighted another shot and made his carom
without the tremor of a pulse--"when they take New York, as I suppose they
will in a week or two, we shall move them to Boston, and so keep on working
East till they drive us into Canada or the Atlantic."
And this was not all a jest, by any means. The player had so telegraphed,
and he more than half believed that his goods were at that time in course
of removal, while he had no thought whatever of deserting his
billiard-table and going down to assist in defending them. He was not
alone, meanwhile, in his reprehensible coolness, as history will be at some
pains to record of that extraordinary crisis.
Philadelphia presented many strange spectacles on those days. Apart from
the blowing of a brass band on every corner, the patrolling of every
sidewalk by a recruiting officer with fife and drum, and the requisite
number of human "stool-pigeons," and the exhibition of the placard before
noted, offering every inducement in money and every plea of patriotism for
"State defence,"--there were other and yet more marked indications of a
period out of the common order even for war-time. The American and the
Merchants', favorite resorts of mercantile buyers from the rural counties
of the State, were full of guests, but they lounged in the reading and
smoking-rooms, and had no thought of commercial transactions. Gold was
going up, its higher rate marking increased fever in the pulse of the
national patient; and yet business was almost as stagnant in the broker's
offices of Third Street as were wholesale transactions in the heavy houses
on Walnut and Chestnut and Market below Second. The old Tonawanda and the
still older Saranac, lying idle at the foot of Walnut Street, their yards
lank and bare as winter trees, and the ships waiting for freight that
seemed to be long in coming, found a new use in illustrating the hopeless
stagnation of the city. The theatres had nearly all closed before, and the
last hurried its unprofitable season to an end. The red bricks of old
Independence Hall seemed more dingy than ever; and those who glanced into
the hall where the great Declaration was signed in Seventy-six, at the
cracked bell and the other sad reminders of a past age and a by-gone
patriotism, thought whether new masters would not claim those relics for
their own, before many days, issuing a new manifesto of slavery from that
second Cradle of Liberty, while their gaunt steeds were picketed in
Independence Square. Men saw the sleepless eye of the clock look down from
the old steeple, at night, with a helpless prayer, as if something of
protection which had before lived in the sacred building was to be found no
more; and the bell woke many a sleeper at midnight, with its slow and
melancholy stroke, to a feeling of loss and sorrow like that which it might
have evoked when sounding for the burial of dear friends. All day long
crowds gathered and held their place, wearily moving to and fro, but never
dispersing, in the open space in front of the historic pile; and "peace"
orators, who had before been awed into silence by the threats and
demonstrations of earlier days, once more ventured treasonable harangues to
sections of those crowds, while the policemen scarcely found energy enough
to disperse the hearers or arrest the disturbers. The bulletin boards were
besieged; the newspaper offices had a demand for extras unknown to the
oldest inhabitant of the quiet city; and the telegraph offices, busied
alike with messages of public and private interest, had never before known
such a test of their capacity since Morse first set Prometheus at his new
occupation of a messenger. A few troops marched away, the Reserves (with
Dick Compton in their ranks) among the number; and the New York militia
regiments and some of the New Jersey troops passed through on their third
campaign for "home defence;" but the public mind was not reassured. Once
there was a rumor that McClellan had been called again to the command of
the Army of the Potomac, or at least entrusted with the defence of the
State, and then the general pulse for the moment beat wildly; but the
inspiriting report died away again, the non-arrival of the morning train
from Harrisburgh one day threw the whole city into panic, and the thought
of successfully defending the State capital sunk lower than ever. The
President, who had been bespoken to meet the Loyal Leagues and raise a new
flag on Independence Hall on the Fourth of July, was too busy or too much
discouraged, and would not come; and what heart lacked an excuse for
sinking down when so much was threatened and so little spirit shown for
meeting the great peril?
This was the week preceding the Fourth; and in that week, which closed with
the National Anniversary, what changes had taken place! The time and its
vicissitudes seemed to be an exact offset to the hopes and the
disappointments of the same period of 1862. Then, the Army of the Potomac
had lain before Richmond, and the Fourth was to have seen the old flag
waving in the rebel capital. It had really seen the little General driven
back upon the James, and repulsed if not hopelessly defeated. The Fourth of
1863 was to see Harrisburgh in the hands of the rebels, and the national
cause sunken lower than it had before been since the advent of the
secession. What did it really see? Thank God for a few such hours as those
of the close of the Fourth, in the midst of whole centuries of loss and
disappointment! All was changed--all was saved! Meade, a man of whom but
few knew any thing more, a week earlier, than that he was a brave man, a
good fighting General, and a brother of the overslaughed Captain Dick
Meade, of the North Carolina--Meade had arisen in doubt and culminated in
glory. Bloodiest and most important of all the battles of the Continent,
Gettysburgh stood already upon the pages of the National history, soaked
with the blood of the bravest--holy with the bravery and the energy which
had there broken and rolled back the tide of invasion, and yet to be holier
still as the Cemetery of the Battle-Dead of the Republic. Orators who began
their Fourth of July addresses with only their pulses of anxiety stirred by
the knowledge that there had been three days fighting, that Reynolds was
killed, and that the conflict seemed to have been desperate and undecided,
did not close them before they knew that the great victory was won, that
Meade was to be thenceforth a name of honor in the land, that Lee and his
hordes were in disastrous retreat, and that the "invasion of the North" was
at an end for all the time covered by this struggle. The news of Vicksburg
was soon to come, another crowning glory for the Fourth, though not known
for days after, and Grant was to be a third time canonized. But just then
there was enough without Vicksburg, and the nation might have gone mad over
the double tidings had they come at once.
Who, that has one drop of patriotic blood surging in his heart, can ever
forget the reading of those "victory extras" that flew wide over the land
on Saturday night and Sunday morning--the quavering voices of the readers,
the reddening cheeks and flashing eyes of the hearers? Never before did so
much seem to have been won, because never before did so much seem to have
been perilled. And Philadelphia, that had sunken lowest in despondency of
any of the great cities, naturally rose highest when the word of victory
came. Bells rung, flags waved, music sounded, gas blazed like the noonday,
processions paraded, business revived as if Trade had a human form and a
crushing weight had suddenly been lifted from its breast, and old
Independence Hall once more boomed its bell and flashed over the city its
midnight eye of fire, as if its defiance to tyranny and treason had never
faltered for a moment.
It was of Gettysburgh that Kitty Hood had been reading, at her little
cottage home near the great road, after her return from church on Sunday
the fifth of July, when she dashed away the tears of agitation and anxiety
that had been gathering in her eyes, and said:
"Dick Compton was right, after all, and I was a fool to try to keep him
away! If he had obeyed me, I should have despised him now; and if he has
not been killed in that terrible battle and lives to come home again, I
will tell him how wrong I was, and what a ninny I made of myself, and how
sorry I am for every word I spoke that day, and how much better I love him
because he obeyed the call of his country instead of the poor, weak,
miserable voice of a frightened woman!"
And it was of Gettysburgh and the desperate fighting around Cemetery Hill
that Robert Brand had been reading, on the same Sunday afternoon, sitting
in the shade of his own piazza, when he hurled out these bitter words,
which poor little Elsie heard as she lay upon the lounge in the parlor
within:
"This is what he has lost, the low-lived, contemptible poltroon! _My son_,
and to shirk a great battle! He might have been dead now, and in a grave
better than any house in which he can ever hide his miserable life; or he
might have had something to remember and boast of all his days--that he was
one of the Men of Gettysburgh! If I had two legs, I would go out and find
him yet and shoot him with my own hand--the infernal cowardly cur!"
And then the disgraced and irate father tried to forget his son and to bury
himself in other details of the great battle.
The sister did not reply aloud to her father's renewed objurgation. She
merely sobbed a little and took from her bosom a crumpled note and read it
over again for perhaps the fiftieth time, muttering low as she did so:
"Oh, father, father! If you knew how far you would need to go to seek poor
Carlton and make him even more miserable than he is, and how little chance
you have of ever seeing him again while you live--perhaps you would not
speak so cruelly of him." Then she kissed the crumpled note again and put
it back into her bosom, and tried to compose herself once more to that
sleep which the tropical heat invited and her aching heart forbade.
From the tone of that letter, it would seem that Elsie had written to her
brother, to his place of business in the city, when fully aware of the
unreasonable indignation which moved her father, advising him not to risk
serious personal insult by coming home until he should again hear from
her,--and that he had replied, from a place much farther away, informing
her of his intention to put seas between himself and the eyes of all who
had looked upon his disgrace. But better even this long separation--thought
the young girl--than a return which would induce words between father and
son, never to be forgiven or forgotten while either held life and memory.
Years might mellow the recollection and change the feeling--years when the
country should no longer make demands upon her children to breast the
battle storm in her behalf, and when the eloquent voice in the halls of
justice and the active, busy life in deeds securing the common welfare,
might be sufficient to win new honor and blot away any recollection of that
single sad misstep in the career of manhood. Poor, gentle, loving, faithful
little Elsie Brand!--it may be long before we have occasion to look upon
her again, and indeed she becomes henceforth but a comparative shadow; so
let it be put upon record here that she seemed "faithful among the
faithless" in practising the great lessons of hope and charity. The father
might utter curses to be set down against his own soul in the day when
human words as well as human actions must be called into judgment; friends
might look askance and enemies gloat over the disgrace of one who had
before stood high above them in all the details of honorable character;
even the sweetheart, whose pulses had once beaten so close to his that the
twin currents seemed flowing into one--even she might find some poor excuse
of pride to falsify her by-gone boast that she loved him better than all
the world, and let that hollow, wordy "honor" work their eternal
separation: all this might be, but the _sister_ had no such license to
waver in the course of her affection towards one who had been fondled by
the same hands in babyhood and drawn sustenance from the same maternal
bosom as herself. And no treason, all this, to the truths and the
eternities of other loves. All other relations may sooner change than that
which binds sister and brother, whose fondness has not been tainted by some
falsehood in blood or chilled by some wrong in education. Wife or mistress,
yesterday cold, may be to-day throbbing with the most intense warmth of
absorbing passion, and to-morrow chilled again by instability in herself or
unworthiness in the object of her regard: even the mother, that tenderest
friend of song and story and sometimes of real life, may scatter her
affections wide among so many children that each has but the pauper's
share, or form new ties and forget that ever the old existed. But the
brother, if he be not the veriest libel upon that sacred name, clings with
undying fondness to the sister; and the sister, ever faithful, clings to
the brother "through evil and through good report," when one or even both
may have become a scoff and a bye-word in every mouth that opens to speak
their names. Happy those men for whom the bond has never been either frayed
or broken: sad for those who ever look back through the long years and see
some sunny head of childhood hiding itself beneath the falling clods of the
church-yard, that might have nestled closer to them in after years than all
whom they have grasped, and cherished, and chilled, and lost!
It now becomes necessary to inquire the whereabouts of Carlton Brand, the
subject of so much sisterly love and so much fatherly indignation, at that
second period when Gettysburgh was a glorious novelty, its bloody splendors
flashing broad over the loyal States. And those whereabouts may very
readily be discovered. On the register of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the
city of New York, his name had been inscribed on the Wednesday evening
previous to Gettysburgh (the first day of July); and those among our
readers who may have chanced to be sojourners at the Fifth Avenue during
that week, and who will take the trouble to read over again the close and
accurate description given of the lawyer on his first appearance in the
presence of his sister and Margaret Hayley, in the second chapter of this
narration, may not find much difficulty in remembering the appearance of so
marked a man at the hotel at that period--the glances of admiration cast
upon his handsome face and manly figure as he sat at table or moved quietly
among the ever-changing crowd in the reading-room or down the long
halls--the almost total silence which he maintained, seeming to have no
acquaintances or to be anxious for escape from all conversation--his
inquiring more than once every day at the office for letters which
continually disappointed him--and the expression of drooping-eyed
melancholy in face and restless unquiet in movement, which gave rise to
many side remarks and led to many singular speculations.
He was alone--at least alone at the hotel; and Dr. Pomeroy, if he had
entertained any actual belief in his suggested elopement between the lawyer
and his "ward," might easily have satisfied himself, had he followed him to
the commercial metropolis, that no such elopement had taken place or that
the abductor had hidden his paramour carefully away and managed to keep
continually out of her presence.
Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and
action of Carlton Brand at this time; and the writer, without any wish or
will to do so, yields to the necessity, very much as the proud man of the
world yields to the pressure when events which he has assumed to direct
grow too mighty for his hand and bear him away in their rush and
tumult,--or as a father--to use a yet stronger and more painful
image--submits with a groan and a prayer when the child of his dear love
shuts the heart against him and breaks away from that tender control which
it has been alike his duty and his pleasure to supply. Some of our mental
children, especially when they are so real that time, place and
circumstance cannot be made for them at will, are sadly unmanageable; and
this instance furnishes an illustration which will be better understood at
a later period. Acts may yet be recorded, while yet acts remain to record;
but the heart closes, motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator
grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of
events without connection and actions without explanation.
Taking up his quarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Wednesday, this man, on
Friday, the third of July, while the city was in agonized anxiety over the
conflicting accounts of Meade's first battle of the day before, and while
the black frames for the Fourth of July fireworks were being erected in
front of the City Hall in the Park, with some uncertainty in the minds of
the workmen whether they would not be used for a pyrotechnic display over
the death-throe of the nation,--this man, Carlton Brand, took one of the
omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line passing the door of his hotel, alighted
at the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway, walked down to the Bowling
Green and entered the office of the Cunard Steamships fronting that faded
relic of the Colonial splendors of New York. When he emerged from the
office, fifteen minutes later, the cash-box of the British and North
American Royal Mail Steamship Company was the richer by many broad pieces
of American gold, and Carlton Brand bore, folded away in his wallet, one of
those costly little pearl-white wings on which the birds of passage bear
themselves over the Atlantic. It was evident that he was about to desert
his country--that country for which he had before refused to fight,--to
desert it at the very moment when its fate before God and the world seemed
to hang trembling in the balance.
Coming out from the office of the Steamship Company, apparently wooed by
the breeze from the North River, the lawyer bent his steps in that
direction as if intending to make the tour of the shipping at the piers and
resume his conveyance at some point higher up the town. Past two or three
of the piers; and the dense black smoke pouring out from the funnels of one
of the transport steamers on the eve of departure for the South with troops
and munitions, seemed to attract his attention. He walked down the dock and
observed more closely the movements on and around the vessel. The black
smoke still rolled out, and steam was hissing from the escape-valves. Heavy
wagons were discharging boxes at the gangway, and with much puffing and
clatter a donkey-engine was hoisting them on board. A marine stood at the
plank, bayonetted musket on shoulder, and close behind him an officer. To
the civil inquiry of the lawyer, how long before the steamer would sail,
the sentry replied that she was then steaming-up and would probably leave
within a few hours; and to a request to be allowed to come on board and see
the arrangements of a government transport on the eve of sailing, the
officer, after a moment's glance at the unimpeachable dress and appearance
of the visitor, assented with the stately bow of his profession.
It certainly seemed strange that on that blazing day, when his errand at
the Hudson side of the city had been to inhale the cool breeze from the
river, Carlton Brand, within a moment after stepping on board the
transport, should have ignored all the details of decks, spars, cabins, and
even machinery, and descended the narrow stair-ways, little more than
ladders, leading down to those flaming intestines of the ship from which
the hot air crept up through the companion-ways like breaths from some
roasting and agonized monster. Yet so it was; and regardless alike of the
heat which fevered his lips and the greasy rails upon which he soiled his
gloves and risked the smirching of his spotless summer garments, the
lawyer pressed down to the fire-room, where the stokers were sweating great
drops of perspiration that rolled down like beads from their broiled
foreheads--where the coal was rattling and crashing as it was thrown
forward, then crackling and hissing at its first contact with the flame, as
it was dashed into the midst of the sweltering furnaces. Down, until he
stood before those mighty furnaces and caught blinding glimpses, as the
firemen momentarily opened the doors to dash in still other tons of the
crackling coal of what seemed little less than a ship's-cargo of the fuel,
seething, raging and lowing in such a heat that it made the old fancy of
the lower pit no longer a dream but a horrible present reality.
"Terrible work for hot weather, I should think," said the lawyer, when the
shovels were still for a moment and the great fires raged, roared and
crackled within. He seemed to feel the necessity of saying something to do
away with the impression of his being a sulky intruder,--and was addressing
one of the bronzed old stokers who had paused to wipe from his grimy brow
the sweat that was actually pouring into his eyes and blinding him.
"Yes, hot enough while we are lying at the dock," answered the stoker.
"Why hotter now than at any other time?" asked the lawyer, who had probably
never happened to study that peculiar philosophy, simply because he had
never been thrown into contact with it.
"Why? oh, Lord bless you!--because we are lying still, now, and there is no
draught. When we are going through the water, and of course through the
air, the motion makes a draught and we do not more than _half_ roast."
"Then it never gets _very_ cool down here?" was the next inquiry.
"Not _very_!" answered the fireman, sententiously. "But we never have the
worst of these hot fires," he continued, answering something that had not
been spoken but that seemed to be in the face of his auditor.
"Who then?"
"The passengers--at least some of them--on board any steamer that carries
them over sea or down the coast."
"You mean when they--when the steamers take fire and burn?" The question
was asked in what seemed to be a hurried and troubled voice; and had not
the reflected glow from the furnace made every thing red under its light,
there might have been seen a face of ghastly white contrasting with the
dark and grimy one so near.
"No!" and the stoker laughed. "I did not mean that--only the thought of it.
Steamers do not burn _very_ often--not half so often as I should think they
would, the way they are built, and with a whole Pennsylvania coal-mine on
fire inside of them at once. When they do go, though, they make things
howl! No slow burning, as there is sometimes on sailing-vessels, so that
they can batten down the hatches and keep the fire under until there is a
chance of help: every thing goes in a moment, and all is over in an
hour--iron steamer or wood, very little difference."
"Horrible!" said the lawyer. The word seemed forced from him, and there
could not be a doubt that he was at the moment fancying some terrible
reality.
"Yes, horrible enough!" answered the stoker. "But what I was speaking of,
is the foolish habit that passengers have--I have seen it often in crossing
the Atlantic--of coming down into the fire-room very soon after they start,
and taking a look at the furnaces. A good many of them never sleep a wink
afterwards, during the whole voyage, I believe, thinking of that mass of
red-hot coal lying in the middle of the ship, and wondering _when_ she is
going to burn. They are fools to come down at all: if they would just keep
out of the way they would never know how badly it looks, and then at least
they would never be burned until their time came!"
Just then the raging monster within seemed to demand more blazing food,
and the stoker turned away to attend to his duty. Had he remained
conversing one moment longer, he might have seen Carlton Brand totter back
against the bulk-head of the fire-room, literally gasping for breath--then
grapple for the railing of the stairs, and ascend the steps with the
staggering motion of a sick or drunken man, breathing heavily and giving
painful indications of being on the verge of falling insensible.
When the lawyer again emerged to the air of the deck, his face was ghastly
white, and he seemed altogether strangely altered since the moment of his
descent into those regions of fire and grime and terrible suggestion. What
had so changed him?--the heat, choking his lungs and preying upon a frame
unaccustomed to it?--or had the curse of his nature again found him out, in
the low of the furnaces and the heedless conversation of the fireman? and
did he remember that between himself and even that flight beyond the sea
which only could shut out from his ears the voice of contempt and the cry
of a neglected country, there yet lay the peril of the Amazon and the
Austria?
This occurred on Friday the third of July; and between that day and the
Sunday following there was nothing in the movements of the sojourner at the
Fifth Avenue, worthy of special record. But on that Sunday afternoon,
perhaps at the very hour when Kitty Hood, in one spot of that section of
country which had been his old home, was glorying over her lover's having
been at Gettysburgh,--and when Robert Brand, in another, was writhing and
cursing over the absence of his son from the same great battle,--an
incident took place at the hotel, apparently trivial, but which may
subsequently be found to have exercised no slight influence on the fortunes
of some of the different persons named in this chronicle. Unfortunately,
again, over this little event hangs a mist and a shadow, and only slight
glimpses can be obtained of what afterwards proved to be of such
unsuspected importance.
On that Sunday afternoon, at about two o'clock, Carlton Brand went down
from his room to the office of the hotel, to exchange a few words with the
clerk, and to secure one of the battle-extras which he had just heard from
his window cried in the street. Knots of men, guests, or passers-by, driven
in by the pouring rain without, filled the long hall, every third holding a
newspaper, every group in more or less animated conversation, and the one
topic that great conflict which had just bloomed out into a great victory.
The lawyer seemed to have company enough in his own thoughts, and did not
join any of the groups. He secured his extra, transacted his brief business
at the desk, and returned immediately upstairs. The moment after he had
left the desk, a young man advanced from one of the groups near the door,
asked a question of the clerk, was answered, overran a few pages of the
register with eye and finger, and then passed upstairs under the guidance
of a servant.
Carlton Brand had already thrown off coat and boots again, and was sitting
at the open window in dressing-gown and slippers, glancing over the
sensation-headings of the extra which gave the particulars of the Waterloo
of Secessia,--when there was a tap at the door. Stepping hastily thither
and opening it, with a muttered wonder why he could not be left alone to
his reading, a well-known figure stepped into the room and one of his
Philadelphia bar-intimates--perhaps the nearest to a confidential friend in
the whole profession, took him by the hand. For an instant the occupant of
the room seemed to be displeased at the intrusion and an expression of
annoyance flitted over his face; but old friendship was evidently too
powerful even for shame and lacerated feeling, and the next instant he had
cordially returned the grasp.
The new-comer, strangely enough, bore no slight resemblance to Carlton
Brand. We say strangely, because the lawyer was by no means such a person,
in general appearance, as could be readily duplicated. Henry Thornton, his
professional brother, had the same tall, lithe figure with evidence of
great agility, the same mould of countenance in many respects, and with
eyes of hazel only a shade darker than Brand's. But here the resemblance,
which might otherwise have been extraordinary, became slighter and
eventually disappeared. His complexion was much darker, even brown, from
chin to forehead, indicating Southern blood or residence. His hair, curling
a little, was of very dark brown, almost black; and his heavy moustache,
the only beard he wore, was so nearly black as generally to pass under that
designation. In spite of the similarity of form and feature, it may be
imagined that these differences told very strongly on the general effect
produced by the two men on the mere casual observer; and while there was
that indefinable something in the face of Carlton Brand, to which attention
has before been called, denoting intellect and true nobility of soul,
accompanied by an occasional pitiable weakness or want of self-assertion of
the full manhood, there was that quite as plainly to be read in the face of
Henry Thornton, which told of dauntless courage and iron will, a brain busy
and scheming if not even plotting, and powers which might not always be
turned to the service of the candid, the open and the honorable. Lavater
would have thought, looking at his face--Well for him and for the world if
what he wills is in consonance with honor and justice, for what he wills he
will pursue with the unfaltering courage of the lion and the untiring
determination of the sleuth-hound!
But Nature, giving to these two men who held no known relationship
whatever, so striking a resemblance in some particulars and so great a
dissimilarity in others--had not quite ended her freak of comparison. It is
doubtful whether either was fully aware of the fact, but the similarity
between the tones of their voices, in ordinary times, was quite as marked
as that between certain physical features; and any person standing that day
without the door, when the two had entered into conversation, might have
been puzzled to know whether two persons were really speaking or one was
carrying on a monologue. This, only at ordinary times: Thornton's voice was
much steadier and more uniform under feeling, and it never broke into tones
so low and melancholy as that of the other, when influenced by temporary
depression.
Such was Carlton Brand's visitor on that Sunday afternoon, and he it was
who but the moment after was seated in the proffered chair near the window
and chatting upon current topics with as much nonchalance as if he had
merely called upon his entertainer at his little office on Sixth Street,
Philadelphia, instead of visiting him at a hotel in a distant city.
There was a little table standing between the two windows of the room and
within reach of Thornton as he sat. On the table lay part of that
miscellaneous collection of articles which every careless bachelor will
persist in scattering about his room at the hotel; and at the edge of what
may be called the pile lay a paper more than half unfolded, which caught
the observant eye of the visitor. With a quick: "Will you allow me?" which
brought an affirmative response, he reached over, took up the paper,
unfolded it and read a receipt for a first cabin passage in the Cunard Mail
Steamship to sail from New York to Liverpool, on the 8th July, for which
$130.50 had been paid by Mr. Carlton Brand.
"The Cunarder for Liverpool next Wednesday," he said, when he had finished
running his eye over the passage-ticket.
"Yes," answered the owner, and he answered nothing more.
A strange expression passed over the face of his interrogator--an
expression so doubtful that even Lavater, or any other man pretending to
read the human countenance like an open book, might have been puzzled to
say whether it conveyed pleasure, scorn, wonder, or any one of the thousand
different feelings whose outward show glints over our faces as often and as
transiently as the cloud-shadows floating over the mountain woods or the
mottled sunshine flickering over the wheat-fields. There was something
there--something which the other did not appear to notice; and with that
fact we must be content.
Five minutes later, Carlton Brand, through the medium of words growing out
of the discovery of the passage-ticket, was in confidential conversation
with Henry Thornton with reference to the disgrace which had driven him
from home and must make him an exile for years if not forever. It may have
been a serious weakness, towards one who had never been even on terms of
speaking acquaintance with her, to talk to him of Margaret Hayley and to
confess the shameful dismissal which he had received. But Henry Thornton
knew of the Hayleys if he did not claim an acquaintance with them; he had
it in his power to impart information of them and their probable movements
during the summer, which the other might have found difficulty in obtaining
through any other means; and perhaps that knowledge gave some excuse for
reciprocal confidence. At all events that confidence was given, and it
elicited a return of apparently equal candor. Before the separation took
place, at the end of an interview which lasted more than an hour, a strange
bond seemed to have been established and cemented between the two lawyers,
very different from any which official intercourse can often rivet. That
interview, in fact, appeared to have produced marked effects upon both, for
while on the face of Henry Thornton, as he rose to take his farewell, there
was a look of entire satisfaction that could not have been without a
meaning more or less creditable,--there was in the eye of Carlton Brand
less of that troubled expression which had been for days resting there like
a shadow, and he breathed as if a weight had been lifted from his breast.
To one this new satisfaction and lightness of heart may have been no false
presage: to the other, what an omen of unsuspected evil, disaster and
death!
They parted at the door of the lawyer's room, with a much warmer grasp of
the hand than that with which they had met little more than a hour before;
and each held the palm of the other in his for a moment, as those should
do who have however slight a bond in common and between whom the waves of a
whole wide ocean are so soon to roll.
"A pleasant voyage and a happy return!" said the one, on the threshold.
"A pleasant summer to you, wherever you are!" was the reply of the other.
So parted, after that brief meeting, Henry Thornton and Carlton Brand. The
bearer of that latter name, once so honored but now holding so doubtful a
position, left New York by the Cunarder Scotia from Jersey City on
Wednesday the 8th of July, looking his last that evening from the deck of
his steamer, on the dim blue line of the Highlands--a fading speck of that
native land that the fates had ordained he should never see again with his
living eyes! And as at this moment we lose sight of him for the time, to
trace the fortunes of others remaining on this side of the Atlantic, it may
be well to say that his outward voyage must have been a safe and prosperous
one, for there was duly registered as having arrived at Liverpool, on the
twentieth of July, (a date which it may afterwards be important to
remember) "Carlton Brand, Philadelphia."