[1]September, 1862.
[1]September, 1862.
"Now," Leslie concluded, "you know as much of Dexter Ralston as I do. And I think you will quite agree with me that he is one of the last men I could have expected to meet in the streets of New York at the present moment, when martial law is so prevalent and Fort Lafayette so convenient."
"Humph!" said Harding, getting up from the bed where he had lounged so long, examining his watch to see that it was nearly midnight, and lighting a fresh cigar to go home. "Humph! well, what do you make of him? A leading traitor, deep in the counsels of Jeff. Davis, Yancey and Company?"
"Humph!" said Leslie in return, "what else can he be?"
"Or a Virginia Unionist, faithful among the faithless, and too brave to be afraid anywhere?" suggested Harding.
"Ah!" answered Leslie, in that tone which suggests a new idea, or the corroboration of an old one.
"Or a trusted agent of the Federal Government, giving up old prejudices for the sake of patriotism, and better acquainted with Seward than Slidell—eh?"
"By George!" exclaimed Leslie, "there is something in that idea! He must be one of the three—but which?"
"That we may know better one of these days," said Harding, as Leslie accompanied him out to the street. "Meanwhile he is certainly a most singular person, and I shall not be sorry to know more of him, whether as friend or foe to the nation!"
How soon and how remarkably his wish was fulfilled, to some extent, we shall see hereafter.
The Invalid and the Wild Madonna—A Brave Heart Beating the Bars of its Prison—Odd Comfort and Doubtful Consolation—The Dawn of a Terrible Suspicion.
In the neat and tastefully-furnished back parlor of a house on West 3—th Street, one afternoon, at very nearly the same period mentioned in a previous chapter—the latter part of June, 1862—lay on the sofa a young man, of perhaps twenty-five, with a countenance that would have been strikingly handsome if it had not been drawn and attenuated by suffering. He had a well-chiselled face, clear blue eyes, and light-brown, curling hair, closely shaven of beard or moustache; still showing, spite of sickness, the manly nature that lay within, and which always makes, when it radiates outward, a pleasanter picture for the eye of a true woman than can be supplied by even high health and the most perfect physical beauty without it. The limbs, extended upon the sofa as he lay, though a little attenuated like the face, showed that they were well-formed and athletic. And the hand, drooping over the side of the couch, though too thinly white to suggest a love-pressure, indicated, in the taper of the fingers, and the fine round of the back, without any coarse protruding knuckles, what a handsome little Napoleonic hand it must have been when the owner was in full health and the life-blood coursing freely through his veins.
By the appearance of the little back parlor, it seemed to be half sick-room and half study, for, in addition to the sofa and an easy-chair, there was a well-filled book-case, in walnut, and a writing-desk open on a small table, with blank paper, some manuscripts, pens, ink, and a book or two lying open, as if the occupant had been writing not long before, and lain down from pain and weariness, without waiting to replace his writing materials in their proper position. Through the open door of a small room adjoining, some pieces of bed-room furniture could be seen, showing that when the invalid wished to find more complete repose, he could do so without painful removal to any distance. Close by his side lay a daily newspaper fallen upon the floor, with the sensation-headings of war-time displayed at the top of one of the columns; and in his hand he held a palm-leaf fan, with which he had apparently been trying to wave off some portion of the sultry heat of the afternoon. At length the fan grew still, the weak hand fell down on his breast, and he seemed to be dropping away into quiet slumber.
Suddenly a strain of martial music floated through the open windows—at first low and gentle, then bursting loud and clear, with the rattle of drums, the screaming of reeds and the clash of cymbals, as a band came nearer along the avenue and approached the corner of the street. The invalid's face lit up—he made a motion to rise hastily from the sofa—a sudden spasm of pain crossed his countenance, and he fell back exhausted, with a slight cry which instantly brought the sound of sliding doors between the little back parlor and the large room that adjoined it in front, and sent a pair of light feet flying into the room.
"Trying to get up again, eh, old fellow? I know you! Couldn't lie still when that music was going by! Now you great big boy, you ought to know better!" Such were the words with which the young girl greeted the sufferer, as she dropped down on her knees by the side of the sofa and took one of his hands in both hers.
"Yes, Joe, Iwastrying to get up and listen to the music," was the reply. "You know how I have always loved the brass band, and how it seems to rack my frame even worse than disease, just now! See what a wreck I am, when I cannot even attempt to rise from the sofa without screaming in that manner and alarming the house!"
"Oh, never mind alarming the house!" replied the girl, whom he had called "Joe," the very convenient and popular abbreviation of the Christian name of Miss Josephine Harris. She was, it may be said here, an almost every-day visitor from the house of her widowed mother, a lady in very comfortable circumstances, living not many blocks away up-town from the residence of the Crawfords. In ordinary seasons Joe and her mother (the young lady is made to precede the other, advisedly)—had a habit of getting away from the city, early in the season, to one of the watering-places or some cool retreat in the country; but this year perhaps the illness of Richard Crawford had something to do with retaining at least the daughter late in town. "The house can get along well enough—it isyouthat is to be taken care of, and I should like to know, Dick Crawford, how any body is going to do it if you do not manage to moderate your transports and lie still when you have not strength to do any thing else!"
How her tongue ran on, and what a tongue she had! Not a bit of sting in it, except when she was fully aroused to anger, and then it would suddenly develope the faculty of morally flaying her victim alive, with words of indignation that tumbled over each other without calculation or order, in the effort to escape the tears of vexation that were sure to follow close behind. At such moments Joe's tongue was actually cruel, though without premeditation; at other times it was simply a very rapid and noisy tongue, that spoke very sweet words most of the time and exercised an influence all around it that no one could attempt to describe. But perhaps the tongue was not alone concerned in the matter. There may have been something in the rather tall and lithe form—the brown cheek with a dash of color shining through it the moment she was in the least degree warmed or excited—the eyes dark but sunny, wavering between hazel brown and Irish gray, and the most difficult eyes in the world to look into and yet keep your head—the profile uneven and partially spoiled by the nose being decidedly pert, retroussé and too small for the other features—the pouting red lips that never seemed to fade and grow pale as the lips of so many American women do before one half their sweetness has been extracted by the human bee—the wealth of glossy black hair, coming down on the low forehead and plainly swept back in the Madonna fashion over a face that otherwise had the purity and goodness of the Madonna in it, but very little of her devotion,—perhaps there was something in all this, besides the influence of her flood-tide of language, to make Josephine Harris the delight, the botheration and the absolute tyrant of more than half the persons with whom she was thrown in contact. Perhaps there was even more than all, to those with whom she came into closer intercourse, in the breath that always seemed as if it came over a bank of over-ripe strawberries dying in the sun, late in summer—and that intoxicated with its aroma as rare old wine does with its flavor.
It is not difficult to believe (par parenthese) that the pearls and diamonds that dropped from the mouth of the good little princess in the old fairy story, every time she opened the ruby portals of her lips, dissolved themselves into air and came out in breath suggestive of spice-fields and orange-groves, and that the toads and scorpions falling from the mouth of her wicked sister manifested themselves in a corresponding rank and fetid odor. So bear with us, lady of the fevered breath, if we take the privilege of ago and long sight to drink in your flood of pleasant wisdom from a distance; and think not your lover overbold, Edie of the Red Lips, if he bends so near you when you speak, that the waves of brown and the curls of black even nestle together!
"Another sermon, eh, Joseph?" said the invalid, trying to smile and apparently soothed away from his pain by the very presence of the young girl. "Another sermon just because I cannotalwaysremember that I am a poor miserable wreck!"
"Miserable fiddlestick!" said Joe, smoothing down his hair with both hands and accidentally stooping down so low that her lips came near enough to his forehead to breathe on it and send a pleasant creeping chill to the very tips of his toes. "I read you sermons, as you call them, because you are very impatient and very imprudent, and because I really have no one but yourself who is tied down so as not to be able to run away when I begin preaching. Don't you see that?"
"Yes, I do!" said the invalid, whom she had unconsciously introduced to us in calling him Dick Crawford—"I see!" and his face grew into a transient smile in spite of himself. "But where is my sister, and what was the music?"
"Two questions at once, like all the men!" the saucy girl answered. "But go ahead, for asking questions won't hurt your rheumatism. Bell has gone out shopping, I believe. She discovered an hour ago that there was a shade of cerise ribbon somewhere or other that she had not managed to get hold of, and of course she ordered the carriage at once and posted after it. As for the music—oh, the music was a brass band accompanying the One Hundred and Ninetieth Regiment. They are going to leave to-morrow, and they came up the avenue to receive a set of colors from Mrs. Pearl Dowlas, the ugly old woman with all that brown-stone incumbrance and three flags in the windows, round the corner."
"Going to-morrow!" said the invalid, and the old pained expression came back to his face. "Going to-morrow!—everybody is going!—and I lie here like a crushed worm, unable to move from my couch, useless to myself or to any one else, when the country is calling upon all her children to aid her! Pest on it! I would trade life, hopes, brains if I have any, every thing, for a sound body to-day!"
"And make a great fool of yourself in doing so!" was the flattering response of Josephine. "Now I suppose that music and my gabble have started the mill, and we shall have nothing else during the rest of the day than the same old weepings and wailings and gnashings of teeth. Just as if, because a war exists, there was nothing else in the world to do but to go to the war! Just as if we did not require some attention paid to the needs of the country at home, as well as on the battle-field! Just as if we did not need that the trade, and the literature—yes, theliteratureof the country—should be sustained."
"Pshaw!" said Crawford, impatiently, and making an effort to turn over, with his face to the wall.
"No you don't, old fellow!" cried the young girl, exercising the little restraint that was necessary. "You don't get away from me in that manner. I will stop your grumbling before I have done with you, by a remedy a little worse than the disease—plenty of my own gabble! I said literature—do you see that desk littered with papers, you ungrateful wretch?" (It will be seen that Josephine Harris had a habit of using strong Saxon words, as well as some that were "fast," not to say bordering upon popular slang; and the reader may as well be horrified with her, and get over it, first as last.) "You have sent out from that desk words that have done more good to the patriotic cause than the raising of ten regiments, and yet you have not the grace to thank God for giving you the strength to dothat! Youdareto lie there and call yourself useless! Out upon you—I am ashamed of you!"
"Words are not deeds!" said the young man, again moving uneasily.
"Words, when they come from the furnace of a true heart, shape themselves into deeds in others," was the reply.
"In the days of the Revolution, my ancestors did their deeds, instead of shaping them," said the invalid. "Two of them dead in the Old Sugar House and the prison ships at the Wallabout, and another crippled for life at Saratoga, bore witness that patriotism with them was no hollow pretence. And look at the present. My brother John going through battle after battle with Duryea's Zouaves, in Virginia, like a brave man and a soldier; and I lying helpless here, while my cousin Egbert has his regiment almost raised."
"Almost," said the young girl, in a tone which showed that she did not think he had quite accomplished that laudable endeavor.
"And will be going down directly," Crawford continued.
"Yes, going down, clear down, that is if he ever starts!" commented saucy Josephine.
"Yes, I remember, you do not like my cousin Egbert," said the invalid.
"I do not like humbugs anywhere!" sharply said the young girl. "Why don't you call him 'Eg.,' as you do sometimes? Then I should be tempted to make a few bad puns, and to say that in my opinion he is not a 'good egg,' but a 'hard egg,' if not a 'bad egg,' and that I hope if he ever gets among the Virginia sands he will come out a 'roast egg' or a 'cracked' one!"
"Shame, Joe, what do you mean!" said the invalid, really pained by her flippancy.
"Mean? why, mean what I say!" was the answer, "and that is a good deal more than most of the people do now-a-days. Your cousin Egbert is a big humbug! I never see him strutting about, with his shoulder-straps and his red sword-belts, but I have a mind to take the first off his shoulders, with claws like a cat, and use the second to strap him with, like a truant school-boy!"
"Why, Josephine, Josephine!" cried the invalid, still more surprised.
"Don't stop me!" said the wild girl. "I have intended for some time to say this to you, but you have been very sick, and somehow I could not begin the conversation. Now that it is begun, I am going to out with it, if it costs a lawsuit. I do not like that man, nor would you if you could know him half as well as I do. In the first place, I believe he is a coward, and worth no more to the cause than just what his gimcracks would sell for."
"Shame!" again said the invalid. "Josephine, you are really going too far. If he was a coward, why would he have placed himself in a position which must by-and-by be one of danger?
"Bah!" said the young girl, "I do not see that he has done any thing of the kind. Officers have the right of resigning, and some of them have the habit of skulking, I have heard. I will bet my best bonnet against your old worn-out slippers there, that if ever brought to the test your shoulder-strapped cousin would do one or the other! Besides—" and here she paused.
"Well, what is the 'besides'?" asked the young man, a little impatiently.
"Besides, he hates you like a rattlesnake, and would do any thing in his power to get you out of his way," the young girl said, giving out the words as if she was performing a painful operation and only doing it under a strong sense of duty. "Tell me: is there any point in which your interests would run counter to each other? I have seen daggers and poison in that man's eyes when looking at you, and when you have not observed him!"
"Interests?—in conflict? Good heavens, what are you saying, Josephine? Hate me—he?" and a terrible shadow passed over the face of the invalid. A moment before he had been unable to raise himself from the sofa, or bear the least motion, without agony. Now, in the excitement produced by her words and by some horrible doubt which they seemed to have awakened, he forgot the pain, or did not heed it, and struggled up to a sitting posture, his hands to his head and the whole expression of his face changed to one of intense mental suffering.
"Mr. Crawford—Dick!" the young girl cried in alarm; "what has happened—what have I said?—tell me: are you in sudden pain?" and she threw her arm around him to sustain him in his sitting position.
"Do not ask me!" he said, hoarsely. "I cannot speak just now, but you have agitated me very much. My cousin—in his way—heavens!"
At this moment, and when the young girl, frightened at what she had done, scarcely dared to speak another word, and was altogether at a loss what to do, there was a rattle of carriage wheels at the door, the sound of a latch-key applied to the lock, then steps and voices in the hall.
"Talk of the Prince of Darkness, and he is not very far from your elbow!" said Josephine, whose ears were sharper than those of the invalid. "I hear Bell's voice and that of the puissant and patriotic Colonel Egbert Crawford, who has evidently come home with her."
"Hisvoice with hers, after what you have said!" the invalid gasped. "Lay me down quick, and hurt me as little as possible. I have not strength to sit up, and this pain—this pain—it drives me to distraction!" One hand was still at his head, and the other had fallen, whether accidentally or otherwise, over his heart. Whether the one hand or the other covered the pain of which he had that moment spoken, was difficult to tell. One thing was certain—that something in the last few moments had broken him down in health and spirits, even more than his long previous sickness. What was it?
Josephine, ever an excellent nurse in sickness (spite of her rapid tongue), and the one of all a crowd who was certain to have the head of the fainted woman on her breast, and her hands chafing the pallid temples,—assisted the invalid back to his recumbent position as quickly and as easily as possible; and at the moment when she had once more arranged the pillow under his head on the sofa, the glass doors between the front and back parlors slid gently apart, and Isabel Crawford and her cousin the Colonel, who had lately been the subject of so much speculation and agitation, approached the sofa of the rheumatic. His eyes were closed, and Josephine was standing at the open window with its closed blinds. Still she saw what the new-comers did not—a quick, convulsive shudder pass over the recumbent form, and the hand that lay on his heart close with a nervous spasm, as if it was crushing something hateful and dangerous that lay within it.
But the personal appearance of the two who had just entered, and the after events of that interview, must be recorded in a subsequent chapter.
Mother and Daughter—Love, Hate, and Disobedience—Judge Owen in a Storm—Aunt Martha and Her Record of Unloving Marriage and Wedded Outrage.
It was a very pleasant picture upon which Mrs. Maria Owen, wife of Judge Owen of the ——th District Court, was looking just at twilight of a June evening; but something in that picture, or its surroundings, did not seem to please her; for her comely though matronly face was drawn into an expression of displeasure, and the little mice about the wainscot, if any there were, might occasionally have heard her foot patting the floor with impatience and vexation.
The time has been already indicated. The place was the back parlor of Judge Owen's house, on a street not far from the Harlem River—the window open and the parlor opening into a neat little yard, half garden and half conservatory, with glimpses over the unoccupied lots beyond, of the junction of Harlem River with the Sound, up which the Boston boats had only a little while before disappeared on their way eastward, and where a few white sails of trading-schooners and pleasure-boats could yet be seen through the gathering twilight.
But this did not comprise all the picture upon which Mrs. Maria Owen looked; for in the window, with the last rays of the dying daylight falling upon face and figure, sat her daughter Emily, listlessly toying with the leaves of a book that she had been reading until the light grew too indistinct, and with a slight pout on her lip and an expression of dissatisfaction generally distributed over her pretty face, which showed that her own vexation and that of her mother had some kind of connection more or less mysterious. The face was not only pretty, as every one could see,—but softly rounded, womanly and most loveable while yet girlish, as only those could fully realize who had known something of the comparative characters of women. The eyes (in a better light) were hazel, with a depth and transparency which made the very thought of a mean action in her presence apparently impossible; the cheek that showed against the fading light had been rounded to perfection in the soft atmosphere floating about eighteen, as a peach is rounded and colored by the genial air and sunshine of late summer: the heavy masses of hair that had partially fallen out of their confinement and swept down to her shoulders, were scarcely darker than nut-brown; and the hand toying with the book would have shown, even without a better glimpse of the half recumbent figure, that that figure was of medium height, fully rounded and delicately voluptuous. It is not to be supposed that Emily Owen knew quite all this of herself. Some others realized all her perfections, however, as will more fully and at large appear (to use the conveyancers' phraseology); and for the purposes of this narrative it is necessary to have the lady distinctly before us.
And now what had caused the shadow on the matronly face of Mrs. Owen, and the pout on the red lip of Emily? The old—old story: told over at some period or other in almost every household on earth. Old eyes and young eyes, seeing very differently; old hearts and young hearts, beating to very different tunes, and informing the whole being with very different aspirations. There was a love—there was a dislike—and there was a certain amount of parental solicitude and determination—excellent materials from which to construct a serious disagreement and an eventual family row. Not Hecate, when she threw "eye of newt and tail of frog" into the infernal brew on the blasted heath, could have been more certain of the final nature of her compound, than may the presiding genius of any "well regulated family" be of the eventual result when the two acids of love and hate are brought chemically together in the heart of budding womanhood.
There was a certain John Boadley Bancker, a man of a family exceedingly respectable, though decayed, who had himself been a speculator in lands and stocks and amassed more or less money, and who was popularly understood to have been intrusted by Major General Governor Morgan with the authority of Colonel and the permission to raise a regiment for the war. There was a certain Frank Wallace, a young man of no particular family that any one had ever heard mentioned, a fellow of infinite jest and agreeableness, but very little money and no commission at all except to make love when necessary and extract as much comfort as possible from the passing hour,—who carried on a small printing business which just made him a comfortable livelihood, in a narrow street within a stone's throw of the Museum. It was the bounden duty of Miss Emily Owen, seeing that the portly Judge, her father, and the pleasant matron, her mother, had formed the very highest opinion of one of these gentlemen, to fall in love with him as quickly as possible. Of course she had contracted for him a most unconquerable aversion! It was her bounden duty to ignore the other, even if she did not hate and despise him—seeing that he found no other friend in her family: could there have been a stronger guaranty for her going madly in love with the scapegrace?
A moment after the period when we saw them sitting in silence and mutual discomfort, mother and daughter resumed the conversation which had brought about that state of feeling.
"You will be sorry for what you have said, Emily!" said the mother.
"So will you, for whatyouhave said!" was the reply of the daughter, with that species of iteration which displays no wit but a great deal of earnestness.
"You know, as well as I do, that your father has set his heart upon this match," continued the mother, "and you know how much he is in the habit of allowing others to oppose him."
"Yes, I know," replied the young girl, "and I know one thing more."
"Indeed! and what is that?" asked the mother, with the slightest perceptible shade of a sneer in her voice.
"—That both you and my father made a serious blunder in bringingmeinto the world, if you meant to get along entirely without opposition!"
"Hoity toity!" exclaimed the mother, quite as much surprised as nettled at this original and forcible way of stating a domestic fact. "What has become of your modesty? Do you mean to insult both your father and myself?"
"No!" said the young girl, in a sharper tone and with her words cut off much shorter and more decidedly than was her habit. While those plump little white fingers had been toying with the leaves of the book, sitting there in the twilight, heart and hand had evidently both been busy, and they had produced any other effect rather than making their owner more tractable. "No! mother, no! But I tell you, once for all, that the match you are talking of is hateful! I have tried to keep still while the affair seemed at some distance, but now that you bring it closer it fills my whole being with disgust! Do drop it if you do not wish to drive me mad or make me disobedient. Oh, mother!" and the whole manner of the young girl seemed to change and melt in a moment, as she rose hastily from her chair, ran to that on which her mother was seated, threw herself on her knees with her arms around her parent, and buried her face in the sheltering lap,—"oh mother! do be my friend instead of my enemy, in this! I cannot—indeed I cannot marry that man!"
There are a good many things they think they cannot do—these young girls—and they never know themselves until they are tried. Perhaps it may not always be well to try them to their full capacity, however!
What Mrs. Maria Owen might have answered to this appeal, under other circumstances, is uncertain. She was, or intended to be, a good and tender mother, and would have cut off her right hand rather than do any thing which could make against the ultimate happiness of her daughter; and she really, at that moment, must have caught a glimpse of the fact that the heart of the young girl was very much interested in her refusal. But if there was any sentiment which the worthy woman entertained more deeply than another, it was the belief that Judge Owen, her husband, was the most wonderful man in the world. She thought of him with pride when his portly figure disappeared down the steps of a morning, when he was starting to go to "Court." She thought of him with a respect amounting to reverence when she contemplated him sitting
"At once mild and severe,On his seat of dooming,"
(to quote good old Esaias Tegner) a local Rhadamanthus from whose judgment there could not be any possible appeal (although, sooth to say, therewerea good many appeals, and quite effectual ones, from the very unimportant decisions to which only his authority extended). And when he came home at night, after dispensing justice for the whole day (to wit—three hours on the average) she looked with almost holy reverence on his broad brow, under which there must lie such a store of legal knowledge, and thought what a blessed and honored woman she was to have been allowed to mate with so much wisdom and so much dignity.
Does this sound like sneering at the wife's pride and devotion? If so, let there be a word to qualify it. God knows that there are not too many women who respect and look up to their husbands, and that the sanctity and the happiness of the domestic circle would be much seldomer invaded if there was more of this feeling. Only those poor women, on an average, make such terrible mistakes as to the instances that should demand or allow the full indulgence of this pride; and miserable humbugs are looked up to and worshipped so much of the time, while those who could deserve and should command that feeling are treated with indifference or even despised by inferior minds to which they have been mated! They do not "manage these things" any "better in France," probably; but they manage them ill enough in republican America at about this period, and the result is not a pleasant or even a moral one!
The check to any possible motherly concession to the weakness of Emily, which Mrs. Owen experienced on this occasion, arose from the coming of the ponderous man of law, whose heavy footstep and loud cough were at that moment heard in the hall. Had the daughter been less absorbed than she was in her own feelings, she too might have heard those tokens of the Judge's presence; and had she been as wise as her mother, any further discussion of the subject would have been stopped and the coming catastrophe averted.
Either she did not observe or she was too much absorbed to heed who heard her, for at the very moment when Judge Owen, a large-framed, portly, broad-browed, iron-gray man of fifty, entered the back parlor and stood full in the presence of his wife and daughter, the latter was looking up to her mother with clasped hands and half sobbing out a repetition of her former declaration: "I cannot—indeed I cannot marry that man!"
"Hush! Emily, hush!—no more of this!" said the mother, half in hope that her husband might not have caught the words; but she was widely mistaken. The ears so much in the habit of listening to the least quaver in the tone of a witness's voice, were not to be trifled with in the present instance.
"Hey? What is this?" asked the Judge, in a tone that admitted of no trifling in the answer.
"Nothing—that is—Emily was talking of—" began the abashed wife, with a stammer.
"Of—Iknow," said the father, who had heard quite enough of his daughter's words to know without asking, and who was more behind the curtain than his wife, in some other respects. "I heard what this school-girl muttered. Shecannotmarry the man whom I intend sheshallmarry, and she has taken this opportunity, when she supposed I was absent, to acquaint you with her determination."
"Not determination," said the mother, willing to smooth affairs as much as possible—"say wish."
"No, mother, determination!" said the young girl, springing to her feet with an energy which was really not an ordinary part of her nature,—under the impression that now, if ever, was the time to give utterance to her true sentiments. "Father used the right word—determination! I cannot marry Boad Bancker, and I won't! There you have it!"
There was nothing classic or even romantic in the young lady's mode of expression, or the nickname which she bestowed upon her would-be lover; but they were at least natural, which is something gained in this world of pretences and deceptions.
"You won't? and why, I should like to know?" broke in the Judge, for the moment surprised out of the violence that might have resulted, by the very audacity of the declaration.
"Because he is hateful, and ugly, and I do not like him, and—" answered Miss Emily, with a charming return to the system of the school-girl which she had just been called by her father.
"Silence!" thundered Judge Owen, who had recovered from the blow and thought that he had a refractory juryman or an insolent attorney to put down. "Silence! I have had enough of this. John Boadley Bancker is the man I have selected for your husband. He belongs to an excellent family, has wealth enough to keep a wife in comfort and even luxury, and has lately proved himself a true patriot by springing up at the call of the President—" (Judge Owen had by this time forgotten his indignation, and fancied himself for the moment addressing an immense assemblage at Union Square or in the Park)—"by springing up at the call of the President, girding on his—"
"—Shoulder-straps!" put in Miss Emily, who had recovered from her agitation and began to be mischievous the moment her father began to be didactic and ponderous. Whether he heard the interpolation or not, is somewhat doubtful.
"—Girding on his sword," the Judge went on, "and marching—"
"—Up and down Broadway!" put in the young girl, in a second parenthesis, not more audible than the other.
"That is, he has not marched, but is going to march to the seat of war, to fight for—"
"—The niggers!" again and finally interpolated the incorrigible, who had somehow managed to get a peep behind the curtain of national affairs and to see towards what the great struggle seemed tending.
"—For the defence of the country," the Judge concluded his peroration. Then he went on with the pith of his remark, to the effect that the girl who could be mad enough and disobedient enough to refuse the hand of such a man asthat, might go to—mumble—mumble—mumble—for she could never more be daughter of his!
By this time Emily had recovered her equanimity, and almost her spirits, and her mother shared in the feeling of relief, for the explosion had not been half so violent as expected. But there are pauses in storms, the moment before the coming of the most destructive blasts of all, and the temper of Judge Owen was gusty. Miss Emily fancied that the whole ought to be said while the subject was under discussion, and, to use a vulgarism, she "put her foot in it."
"Boad Bancker," she said (she had the common weakness of supposing that the use of a nickname belittled the person spoken of)—"Boad Bancker may be a soldier, but nobody knows it. I know he is a fool; and he is a miserable humbug, pretending to be a young man, when he is as old asyou, Pa!"
If Judge Owen had a weakness unworthy one of the shining lights of the bench, it lay in thinking that his fifty years were only thirty, and that he was yet a young man. Other men than the Judge have labored under the same delusion, and found sick rooms and decrepitude necessary to disabuse them. Probably nothing in his daughter's power to utter would have made him so angry. He had only muttered before—this time he thundered.
"Old! You are talking about age, are you, you shameless, impertinent hussy—insultingmeas well as my friends, are you! I know you, and by G—" (he was a dignitary of the legal profession, and he was speaking in the presence of his wife and daughter; but the truth must be recorded)—"I know what you are driving at, and I'll break you of your fancy or I'll break your stubborn neck! You don't like Bancker, the husbandIpick out for you, because he is not a beardless boy, and you choose to consider himold. And you think I will permit you to encourage that miserable beggar, Frank Wallace, because he isyoung! Let me see one more sign of familiarity between him and yourself, and I will kick him out of the house, as I would a dog—and you may go after him! Do you hear me? Now look out!" And the Judge rang the bell for the servant, scolded her for not lighting the gas that no one had before wished lighted, and stormed out of the room, leaving his wife to follow him, and his daughter to drop again into her chair and muse over the pleasant prospect for after-life lying so broadly before her.
But if the young girl had passed through an agitating and unpleasant scene, and if the prospects for her future life had been sensibly narrowed within the preceding half hour, the depths of her being had not been stirred as they were to be before she slept. Perhaps she had occupied the position of depression into which she had fallen, in the chair by the window, with her head upon her hand, for five minutes—a bitter sea of thought surging through her mind, and her flash of resolution so giving way before her father's terrible anger, that she felt almost ready to sacrifice her happiness, life, every thing, to obey him and secure peace—when a hand was laid gently upon her shoulder, and the quiet face of Aunt Martha, framed in its widow's cap, peered into her own.
"Oh, Aunt, I am so glad you have come down! I was so lonely and so wretched!" broke out Emily, the moment she felt the touch and saw the face.
"I have been down some time, sitting in the front parlor by the window, and trying to make music out of that very-badly-cracked hand-organ that was playing on the other side of the way," said the widow, taking her seat by the young girl's side. Perhaps five-and-forty years had passed over the widowed younger sister of Judge Owen, who made her home in a quiet upper chamber of his house. But they had not much thinned her tall and magnificent form, or entirely destroyed, though they had completelysubdued, the quiet beauty of her face, which must once have been strikingly like that of her niece. She had been in youth the underling of her family, as her elder brother had been the tyrant; and it was perhaps a fitting sequel, that at this period of her life she should have become, to some small extent, a pensioner on his bounty, as well as a peacemaker in his household.
"You have been in the front parlor some time?" echoed her niece, surprised. "Then you must have heard—"
"I heard quite enough," was the answer, as Aunt Martha possessed herself of both the young girl's hands, and finally drew down the nut-brown head so that it rested upon her bosom. "I heard a few of your words—enough to tell me what are your feelings toward the man whom they wish to make your husband. I heard your father's fierce resolution, and I made my own."
"And what was that?" asked the young girl, rising from her recumbent position, and showing something of the surprise she felt at hearing her gentle and pliant aunt speak of forming resolutions. She had cause to be more surprised in a moment.
"What was my resolution?" echoed Aunt Martha. "A strange one, perhaps, but one quite as immovable as my big brother's!"
"Yes, yes—tell me, Aunt,dearAunt!" pleaded Emily, feeling that there was some shadow of hope in such words from such a source.
"My resolution?" said the placid woman, placid now no longer, but starting to her feet, speaking with rapid energy, and seeming, for the moment, half a foot taller than usual—"My resolution is that you shall never marry the man whom I have heard you say that you loathe and detest—not if sacrificing myself can save you—not if I can prevent the wrong, by even taking his life!"
"Aunt! Aunt I what are you saying!" broke out the young girl, surprised, and even horrified. "Do not say so, Aunt, for heaven's sake! Idodislike Col. Bancker; I cannot marry him without misery; but his life! You do not know what words you use."
"Do I not?" said the aunt, and there was a bitterness in her tone which her niece had never before heard there, and which perhaps no one else had heard there for many a long year. "Do I not? His life—pshaw! what is his life, or the life of any man, compared to some other lives that are sacrificed without punishment or even the knowledge of any crime being committed!"
"Aunt, dear Aunt, it is for me that you are saying this, and you know that I thank you; but you are excited, you are not yourself—"
"Iammyself—perhaps for the first time in years!" said the widow, the tones of her voice still betraying the same bitterness. "In the last half hour I have lived over again half a life-time of misery. Close that door!" And she pointed to the door leading into the front parlor, with a gesture of command that shamed her brother's most forcible attempt at dignity. Her niece closed the door, and stepped back to her chair. The aunt retained her standing position, and a part of the time walked the floor of the little back parlor with strides that the shorter limbs of Emily could not have compassed, as she went on:
"I had you close that door because I did not wish to speak to the whole house: though the whole house might hear me without disadvantage to themselves. You do not know why I am so much excited: I will tell you. That man—your father and my brother—did an unwise thing in recalling the past by that brutal speech and that rough oath; but he did recall it, and he must take the consequences. I have said that you should not marry that man whom you detest, and you shall not—no matter how I prevent it! But do not mistake me, Emily! I am not arranging that you shall marry another man, and one whom your parents dislike. That is your business, not mine."
"I will not marry against my parents' will or against yours," said Emily, as her aunt paused for a moment—"only prevent my marrying this man whom I dislike, without doing any crime!"
"Hush, and listen tome!" said the aunt, almost sternly. "Do you think that it is of yourself alone that I am speaking? No—I am thinking and speaking more of myself than of you. Do you guess the riddle? No, you cannot. Emily,I have myself once married a man whom I loathed, and I know what it means!"
"You, Aunt? good heavens!" was the pitying reply of the young girl, while the usually placid widow, occasionally with both hands to her head as if in severe suffering, still walked the room as she spoke.
"You begin to understand me, and you begin to perceive how that man threatening to marryyouto a man you hate, has opened again the wounds of my own sacrifice—a sacrificehemade nearly twenty years ago—heaven forgive him! Richard West was a gambler and a libertine. There was an indefinable something which told me as much, very soon after I met him. He was tall and fine-looking, and he had political influence. My brother had a motive for courting him. He carried out that object by introducing him tome. I can scarcely say that I loved elsewhere, though I certainly had a preference. From the first I had a dislike to West, which soon grew into absolute aversion. Meanwhile I was allowing myself to be more and more in his company, and my whole family, with my big brother at their head, were importuning me to marry him. I was a little reckless and did not know myself; and I think it was more to get clear of his importunities and theirs, than for any other purpose, that I at last permitted myself to be engaged to him. I hated to be teased—I had no other settled hope in the world—and so I promised to marry a man whom I despised. Are you listening?"
"Yes, dear Aunt, listening with my whole heart as well as my ears!" said the young girl, creeping up to her as she made a momentary pause, and taking one of her aunt's hands in both of her own. Strange to say, the aunt did not permit her hand to be retained. She drew it away as if for the moment she had no care for human sympathy,—and went on with her agitated walk and her narration.
"I had a shuddering horror of the marriage, very soon after my engagement was formed, though I knew nothing, except from my own perception, against the character of West. That feeling grew as the marriage day approached, and I found that instead of schooling myself to meet with calmness what was now inevitable, every day increased an aversion which was both mental and physical. I commenced to make my wedding clothes. I began to think that I would rather be making my shroud. And yet I worked on, stolidly, and bore the caresses of the man who was so soon to be my husband. He grew warmer and warmer in his manifestations as the marriage day approached. I suppose he thought he was flattering and pleasing me! God help him, if he did! I was handsome, I know it—and the sensualist began to gloat over the charms he would so soon have in possession. I began to think how soon the slimy worms would crawl over me! At length all this culminated. West was fool enough to take me one night to the Old Park Theatre, where Ellen Tree was then playing. She playedJulia, in "The Hunchback," and I heard her make that agonized appeal toMaster Walterand allude to the expected horrors of an unloving marriage-bed. My eyes were opened. I saw it all, now, as I had never done before. It was not alone my existence and my mentality that I must sacrifice, but mybody. That too was to be given up! To what horrible profanation and outrage was I to be subjected! My head grew dizzy and my eyes blind. I shared in the torments ofJulia—I wasJuliaherself. I was on the brink of a precipice, with hell beneath me and devils goading me on to the leap. I went home stunned and half crazed. West spoke to me, but I believe that I never answered him a word. If I could have killed him suddenly and without reflection, I should have done it.
"The next day I implored my brother to assist me in breaking the hateful engagement. He refused, insultingly, and threatened me with a ruined reputation and the scorn of every one who knew me, if, after being so notoriously engaged to West, and in his private society so much, the marriage should now be broken off. I had no one else to whom to appeal, and appeal to mybridegroomwould have been worse than useless. I could not combat every thing and everybody. My God! my God!—that I should have given up!—but I did. I went on finishing my wedding-clothes, with only a week between me and their use. Oh how I shuddered as my needle ran over the soft white laces and ruffles! They were to deck my dainty limbs foroutrage—such outrage as I did not then know—and such as you can only dream. I only saw before me a vague horror, but that horror was enough to set me on the dizzy verge of madness, of suicide or ofmurder.
"A week went by, and in the presence of a minister of God I swore to a lie. Richard West swore to another, for he was no more capable of love than of honor. Then followed what, woman though you already are, I cannot tell you of—prostitution, outrage, that left me a poor dishonoredthing—my womanhood a curse, and the creeping horror of physical repugnance to a loathsome touch my bridal portion! God forgive those who forced me to this! God forgive them!—I do not know thatIever can! Ten years afterwards I saw one happy day—the first since my engagement. It was when Richard West was shot down in a gambling-house by one of his victims, and brought home dead!
"Now, Emily, you know, better than any other living, the heart of the woman who is supposed to be so calm and placid! Now you can have some idea what I have suffered to-night, when I saw the same pit opening foryou? Do you understand me? Have I said enough?"
"Enough, dear, dear Aunt, but not one word too much! I understand you, I know you, now! Oh, save me, save me at any sacrifice from this marriage!" And the young girl was sobbing in the arms of Aunt Martha, who now that her story was told grew her gentle self again, and smoothed down the brown hair with a promise of aid and sympathy which was not likely to be forfeited.
Another Adventure of the Two Friends—The Light In The Window—A Singular Spot on the Wall—A Climb, A Tumble and a Pursuit—How It All Ended for the Time.
We left Walter Harding and Tom Leslie, at the conclusion of a former chapter, coming out from the lodgings of the latter, on Bleecker Street near Elm, Leslie accompanying Harding out to a car on the Bowery before betaking himself to bed. "Man proposes but God disposes," says the French proverb: There is "a divinity that shapes our ends," even in the matters of going to bed and getting into railroad cars. It was somewhat longer than either had expected, before he reached the "desired haven" of home and a bed-chamber.
It was past midnight when the two friends reached the Bowery, and the Third Avenue cars, on one of which Harding was going up, were running less frequently than early in the evening. There was not one of the green lights in sight down the Bowery from the corner of Bleecker Street, and the friends chatted a moment while waiting for one to make its appearance. Then they grew tired and restless, as people very soon do who are waiting for cars (or boiling tea-kettles, or marriage-days, or any thing of that kind); and they walked down to the corner of Prince to meet the tardy conveyance. There was a green light coming up, some blocks down the Bowery, but it seemed to the two sleepy fellows as if it would never reach the corner. They walked listlessly a block or two down Prince Street toward Broadway, still arm in arm as they had left the house on Bleecker. They wheeled to walk back. Suddenly the eyes of Harding were attracted by the very bright light in one of the upper windows of an old brick house on Prince Street, large and stately and giving evidence of having once been the residence of some person of fortune, though now a little dilapidated.
"People in that house must have an interest in one of the Gas Companies," said Harding, "by the quantity of light they show at this time of night! Why, the window is all ablaze!"
Tom Leslie looked up, as his friend spoke. They were on the opposite side of the street from the house in question, and consequently had a fair view of the lighted window. Itwasvery light indeed, a perfect flood of gas-light pouring on a white curtain that partially covered the whole sash. Partially, not altogether. Whether accidentally or by intention, it was swept away at the lower right-hand corner, leaving a little of the top of the white wall of the room visible, with the edge of the ceiling. Was there ever a man (or woman) who did not look in through a half-closed curtain, precisely because there is no propriety whatever in doing so? Willis has made some of his most taking verbal photographs, during his "lookings on at the war" at Washington, from the glimpses caught of the lower half lengths of notables, more or less undressed, through windows supposed to be closed against outside observation.
Both Walter Harding and Tom Leslie took an eager look up at the white wall and the edge of the ceiling, in the upper chamber of the house on Prince Street. Harding either had sharper eyes than Leslie, or stood in a more favorable position, for he saw what Leslie did not, and his discovery was communicated in the brief exclamation:
"By Jupiter!"
"What?" asked Leslie.
"Look!" said Harding, drawing his friend's head into position for a better view. "If that is not a secesh flag draped up near the ceiling, may I never brag of my eyesight again!"
Tom Leslie took a nearer look. "If it isnota secesh flag," he said, "draped over some kind of a gilded ornament like a star, may I never find another opportunity to look at a pretty girl through this double-barrelled telescope."
And with the word he had whipped out an opera-glass from his pocket, large enough to have been formed out of two moderate-sized specimens of the optical instrument he had named, and levelled it at the object on the wall. His observations and those of Harding through the same powerful instrument resulted in the same conclusion. The two red bars and one white one of the Confederate flag, with the blue field in the corner and meagre number of stars, were all plainly visible, and beneath the flag was a gilded circle, some four or five inches in diameter, with a radiating centre.
"A nice house that, I don't think!" was Tom Leslie's not very classical comment, as he took the double-barrelled telescope finally down from his eye, after a second inspection. (It may be mentioned, in a parenthesis, that the Third Avenue car had some time since rumbled by, and that the very existence of that entire line of communication had been forgotten by the two friends.) "Where is Provost Marshal Kennedy, I wonder?"
"Oh, it may not be quite so bad as you think," said Harding, reading the whole of his friend's thought. "Who knows?—that secesh flag may be a trophy won by one of our soldiers, and brought or sent home."
"Humph!" said Tom, significantly. "That won't do, Harding! If the flag was a trophy, and in the house of a loyal man, it would not be quite so neatly draped on the wall, with the lodge emblem of the Knights of the Golden Circle under it!"
"Phew!" said Harding, "is that really the emblem?"
"Theemblem, and nothing else," answered Leslie. "There is mischief in that house, and the nest must be looked after."
Suddenly, and while the two friends yet looked, there were dark shadows flung on the white curtain, as if of moving figures, and then one shadow, as if of a human arm, began to move up and down on the curtain and kept moving steadily. Directly there was one quick sharp scream, followed by no other sound, though both listened intently. Then a figure came to the window, and apparently looked out, disappearing again in a moment and leaving every thing as before.
"By George, I cannot stand this!" said Leslie.
"Nor I," said Harding, moved by quite a different feeling. "I am getting sleepy and must go home."
"Must you?" said Tom Leslie. "Well, you are not going a step. You cannot be spared just yet. Do you see that tree?"
Harding had seen the tree for some minutes—a tall one with wide branches, standing a little to the left of the window. But he did not see anything special in the tree, while Leslie did, and that made the great difference.
"I am going on a perilous expedition," continued Leslie, in a bantering tone, but his voice sinking lower, almost without his being aware of the fact, and jerking off his boots meanwhile on the sidewalk. "If I never come back, comfort my bereaved wife and children. If I break my neck, see me comfortably buried,withouta coroner's inquest if possible."
"What are you going to do?" asked Harding, with a faint premonition, however, of his intention.
"I am going to get a peep in at that window," was the reply, "or I am going to break the most precious neck in America in making the attempt. I used to be able to climb, though some years ago. Keep still, here goes!"
There seemed to be at the moment no passers in the street, and Harding's anxious gaze around showed no policeman in the vicinity. By the time he had fairly spoken the last words, Leslie had thrown off his broad hat, crossed the street, and commenced climbing the tree. Harding followed and stood under the tree, as if Leslie was going to throw down apples and he must catch them. Leslie was a little awkward, but hugged the bark handsomely, and was soon on a level with the window. Harding saw him distinctly, by the reflected light from the window, clutch his arm around one of the main limbs, and throw his head and body forward so that his face was not more than a foot from the window. He had not looked in more than a moment, when Harding heard him utter a quick, short cry, and the next instant he seemed to be trying to regain his hold of the tree. Then there was a rush, a tumble, and he seemed to be falling. Harding threw himself beneath him, and Leslie half slid and half fell to the pavement, with such violence as to send both sprawling into the middle of the street. Harding was not much hurt; Leslie seemed to be injured, and limped a little as he sprang up.
"Are you hurt, Tom? What made you fall?" was the double question that Harding attempted to ask.
"My God! can that be possible?" was the inconsequent answer, and his hand went up to his head as if the organs of thought were for the moment disordered.
"What do you mean? What did you see, Tom?" was Harding's next double question. Leslie was pulling on his boots.
"See? Nothing—every thing! I will tell you all about it when my brains get settled!" was the reply. "I have simply been frightened out of my boots—no, I left my boots down here. But I was frightened out of the tree, and came devilish near to killing myself andyou. Eh, didn't I?"
"Never mind about that! Tell us what you saw?" said Harding, whose bump of curiosity now began to be seriously agitated.
"The red woman! witch! devil! What does it all mean?" was the torrent of incoherence which next burst from Leslie, not affording Harding a very close solution of the mystery, but promising at least something.
"Well?" said the latter, expecting more. They had again crossed the street, and stood opposite the house of mystery. Leslie was endeavoring to brush his soiled clothes with that most difficult of all brushes, the hand. Harding was looking full at the window, and waiting for the further explanation. Suddenly, a carriage whirled through Prince from the direction of Broadway, and pulled up immediately before the house. Leslie stopped brushing his clothes. At the same moment, a head was again thrust against the window, and immediately withdrawn. Then the light against the curtain dimmed suddenly. Leslie "put that and that together" with the celerity of a lawyer and the confidence of a man of the world. The people in that house were going away. Where? That was something to be looked into.
"You know where the livery stable round the corner is, on Houston?" he asked hurriedly of Harding.
"Yes," was the reply.
"I am too lame to run fast," said Leslie, speaking very rapidly. "We must follow those people, if they go to perdition. Go to the stable, quick—do. There is always at least one carriage standing ready, and have it here as soon as money can bring it. I will watch meanwhile. Hurry! hurry!"
Probably Harding, who was rather precise in his ordinary movements, had not gone so fast in ten years. He was around the corner before the last words had fairly left Leslie's mouth—going as if an enraged woman and three lively policemen had been close after him. Leslie stepped across the street again, took a glance at the number on the lamps of the hack as he passed, and then ensconced himself in a deserted doorway very near, to watch what followed. Every moment that Harding was gone seemed an hour. Would they come out and get away, after all, before the coming of the other vehicle? What kept him so long? (He had been gone about half a minute!) Had there been, for once, no carriage in waiting at the livery? or had Harding concluded to go to sleep on the road? And what the deuce did it all mean—the half-dozen persons, and one a woman almost completely stripped, whom he had seen in that moment's glance into that upper chamber? And the red woman!—aye, thered woman!—that bothered Tom Leslie the worst, and as he had himself confessed, frightened him.
At this juncture the door of the house opened, and a man and two women came out. The man, from his stature and general appearance, and especially from his hat, struck Tom as strangely like the tall Virginian whom they had seen two hours before on Broadway. One of the women might be the girl, Kate; and the third—Leslie indulged in another bit of a shudder as he thought that possibly the third might be the red woman. They were all muffled up, however, and Leslie dared not quit his shelter to observe them more nearly. The driver kept his seat on the box. The man opened the door of the carriage, all stepped in, and the carriage whirled away out into the Bowery and up town. There they were, going, gone, and Harding not yet returned with the means of pursuit! Confusion, vexation and every cross-grained word in the language! So thought Leslie, as he dodged out to the Bowery and watched the disappearing carriage. It had not turned off into any one of the cross-streets, and seemed making for one or the other of the forks of the avenues at the Cooper Institute. Half a minute more, however, and it might as well be the proverbial "needle in the hay-stack" for any chance they would have of finding it again.
Hark! yes, there came tearing hoofs round into Prince Street from Crosby, and the lamps of a carriage shivered with the speed at which they were going. The horses were on the run. It wastheircarriage after all, for nobody else could be in such a hurry. Twenty seconds brought the flying carriage to the corner—a second's pause—a hail from each of the friends—and Leslie was inside with Harding, and the carriage was dashing up the Bowery about as fast as two good horses could run, with Leslie and Harding each peering out of the opened windows at the side, to see if they could catch any glimpse of a carriage ahead.
There is no doubt that the horses attached to the hinder carriage, whatever may have been the opinions of those attached to the one before,—thought that the rate of speed was a little rapid for a hot midnight in June; and certainly one or two pedestrians who came near being run over at the crossings just below the Cooper Institute, had an impression that some rebel prisoner must be running away from Fort Lafayette or some government official trying to stop one. As Harding and Leslie neared that highly respectable but very ugly monument to the profits of iron and glue and the public pride of Mr. Peter Cooper,—of course there arose a question, the carriage being out of sight, which of the two branches it had taken. The Third Avenue being the plainer road, Leslie decided for the Fourth, and with a shout to the driver just before they reached Tompkins Market, the horses' heads were turned in that direction, and away they went up the comparatively quiet avenue.
At the rate they were going they soon overtook a carriage, as they would have overtaken any thing less rapid than a locomotive or a whirlwind. It was lucky that Leslie had taken the precaution to note the number on the hack, as otherwise they would have been at fault after all. As they dashed by the carriage, which was going at good speed, that cosmopolitan saw that the number on the lamps was a wrong one; and so they kept on. Another carriage was passed at the same speed, their horses by this time dripping as if they had been plunged into the river, but the driver of hack No. 2980 going ahead under the influence of a private five dollars and the promise of an extraordinary glass of brandy. At Twenty-eighth Street they jerked the check-string and the driver pulled up. There was nothing in sight, short of the railroad tunnel.
"We have lost them!" said Harding, whose organ of hopefulness was not so large as that of his friend.
"Humph! maybe so!" was Leslie's reply, his eyes peering out of the windows on all sides, meanwhile. "One thing is certain, that I am not going to bed until I find that hack and know where it has been to-night!"
At that moment, with better fortune than two such wild-goose chasers deserved, they saw the lamps of a carriage flash across Twenty-eighth Street, going up Lexington Avenue.
"By George! there they are!" said the sanguine Leslie.
"Maybe so!" was the reply of Harding, echoing the words his friend had used the moment before.
A word from Leslie to the driver, and away went the carriage down Twenty-eighth Street toward Lexington Avenue. On the avenue there was a carriage ahead, driving at good speed but not at such a headlong rate as their own had been pursuing. Leslie pulled the check-string. "Pass that carriage!" he said to the driver, and the horses sprung out at full speed again. The speed of the carriage ahead did not increase: whoever occupied it probably had no idea of being pursued. Before it had gone two blocks further the pursuers had passed it, and Tom Leslie brought his hand down upon Harding's leg with a force that made him wince, as he saw the number on the near lamp.
"Got them, by the tail of the holy camel!"
It was indeed the same carriage that had left Prince Street less than a quarter of an hour before. They were now ahead of it, and it would not answer either to slacken speed so perceptibly as to let it pass, or to turn back to meet it. Either course might excite apprehension, if there was really anything worth watching in the adventure. A word more to the driver arranged all. They wheeled down Thirty-fourth Street to Third Avenue, drove rapidly around the two blocks to Thirty-sixth, and came out again on Lexington, with the carriage just ahead of them and a fine opportunity to dog it at leisure.
Two or three minutes afterwards the leading carriage wheeled out of Lexington Avenue into East 5— Street, not very far from the Eastern Dispensary, which has lately so well supplied the place of a soldiers' hospital. It was driving slowly, now, and unless some peculiar dodge was intended, Leslie knew that the occupants must be near their destination. To follow them further with the carriage would be both useless and dangerous. Stopping the carriage and telling the driver to wait for them in the avenue half a dozen blocks above, the two friends alighted and followed their quarry on foot. They were close behind the carriage, now, but keeping the sidewalk, and even if observed they might have been supposed to be a couple of late wayfarers plodding home, and notspiesas they at that moment felt themselves to be, in however meritorious a cause! About half way between Fourth Avenue and Madison, the carriage stopped before a handsome brown-stone house. "Nothing venture nothing have!" is an old motto that never wears out. Before the rumble of the carriage had fairly stopped or the driver could have had time to turn around, the two friends were over the area railings and under the steps. Not a dignified position, perhaps, nor a pleasant one in which to be caught in the event of a sudden opening of the area door; but other men have risked as much for a much idler curiosity!
Perfect silence under the steps, except two loudly-beating hearts and a little quick breathing. Leslie ventured a look around the corner of the stoop—saw the driver get down and open the door, and the one man and two women alight and go up the steps. For the rest, they were obliged to depend upon the ears. One of the women spoke:
"It will come to-morrow at midnight?"
Harding could feel that Leslie shuddered, and could distinguish his sharp whisper to himself:
"The red woman's voice! I knew I could not be mistaken!"
Then the voice of the man said: "Wait a moment!" and Leslie fancied that he recognized that voice quite as well as the other. Then there was a quick pull of the bell, the sound tinkling far back in the still house. Then came two sharp pulls after the pause of a moment, and then a fourth after another pause. Not until the fourth tinkle had been heard was there any other sound within the house. Then a door was heard to open and shut, and feet were heard in the hall. The man's voice said "All right!" and the carriage drove away. An inner door opened, but the outer one (as the friends could easily distinguish by the sound of the voices) remained closed until some one within asked:
"How many?"
"Seven!" answered the man's voice. Then the outer door opened, all went in, the doors closed and were locked, the footsteps in the hall died away, and the friends heard no more.
Very gingerly, as if some depredation on personal property had lately been committed, the two volunteer midnight guardians of the public weal climbed again over the area railings, after all had been still for a moment. Not a word passed between them. Harding stepped softly up the stone steps to the door and noted the number on it, then down again, as if he was treading on eggs. Leslie counted the number of houses from the corner, with steps not more sonorous, and looked around to see whether they could possibly not have been watched by a policeman, when getting into and out of the area, because they didnotintend to steal. All these things accomplished, and apparently nothing more to be done, they went quietly down 5— Street to Lexington Avenue and sought their carriage.