[6]January, 1863.
[6]January, 1863.
It is said to be a terrible spectacle when a strong man weeps—a thousand times more terrible than the grief of the softer sex and the gentler nature, because it is evident what must have been the blow inflicted and what the struggle before the pent waters burst forth. But even the strong man's grief is tame compared to the spectacle of the grief of anation—that aggregation of strong men and of vital interests. When the very sky seems dimmed and the bright sunshine a mockery. When the foot falls without energy and the voice breaks forth without emphasis. When men, who meet on the corners of streets, clasp hands in silence or only speak in low and broken words. When the silver moonlight seems to be shining upon nothing else than new-made graves. When the sound of revelry from ball-rooms jars upon the heart until it creates deadly sickness; and the glare of lights from places of public amusement seems to be an indecorum like a waltz at a funeral. When a uniform in the street is a reproach and a horror; and the music of the band to which soldiers tramp, sounds like nothing but the "Dead March in Saul." When business is impossible, and idleness an agony. When the old flag is looked up to without pride, and the very pulses of patriotism seem dead because they have no hope to keep them in motion. When all is darkness—all discouragement—all shame—all despair. These are the tears of a broad land—this is the spectacle we witness when a nation weeps. The loyal men of this generation have wept more bitterly and sorely, within the past two years, than those wept who saw the armies of the Revolution starved and outnumbered—who pined in the Prison-Ships and tracked the bloody snow at Valley Forge. God forgive those who have wrung these tears—whatever the ultraism they may represent! The people they have outraged will not forgive until a terrible vengeance is taken.
The first days of July, when fell the President's fifth proclamation, calling for "three hundred thousand more." If ever a cry of despair burst out from an overcharged heart, it went up to heaven from the whole land at that moment. "Have I yet more to give?" cried the depopulated city and the desolated village. "Have I yet more to give?" cried the father with one son remaining of his six brave boys; "Have I yet more to give?" echoed the widow whose last stay was to be taken from her; and "Have I yet more to give?" re-echoed the wife as she buckled the sword or the bayonet-sheath on the side of her husband and sent him forth as one more sacrifice to the insatiate demons of Ambition and Mismanagement. Have not the days following Manassas, and the Seven Days before Richmond, and Fredericksburgh, been hours in a national Gethsemane? And has not the hand been almost excusable, lifted in the prayer: "Father of Nations!—if it be possible let this cup pass from us!" And yet the cup has not passed—we have been draining it to the very dregs!
The introduction of this chapter, which does not in the least advance the action of the story, would be altogether inexcusable, did not every artist have a habit of painting a background for his historical composition, instead of throwing the figures on the naked canvas and thereby losing half his little chance of illusion. The characters here introduced may live and move, but relieved against what? The background of current events, certainly—without a knowledge of which their actions might be altogether unaccountable. And general as may be a feeling to-day, it must be caught and put upon record to-morrow, or the very persons who held it most deeply will forget it by the third day. Ten years hence—perhaps a year hence—the bitter humiliation through which the country has been passing between the opening of 1861 and the opening of 1863, will be almost entirely forgotten in after glory or after shame. A few will remember, but faintly and dimly, as the old veterans of the Revolution remembered in their tottering age the conflicts through which they had passed in youth, beside Washington or with Mad Anthony. A few will remember something of the truth, but only as veteran play-goers remember a performance at the Old Park in its palmy days—a Cooper or a Power prominent, but all the other actors lost in the mists of time.
When Thomas Wilson left the field of Brandywine, after that disastrous defeat, and with a bullet-hole through his neck, narrowly missing the jugular, which had been received in aiding to rescue and bear off the wounded Lafayette,—that battle-scene was so imprinted on his mind that he believed he could ever afterwards, to his dying day, recall the position of every squadron, and even the place of every rock and tree beside which he had fought; and yet when he saw him, more than half a century afterwards, hobbling along on his stout hickory cane to the place where he was to draw the scant pittance afforded him by a nation grudging in its gratitude—he remembered Lafayette and that he was wounded in helping to bear him off—nothing more. No doubt John Wilson, grandson of the old man, wounded in the assault at Fredericksburgh, came away from that murderous field with the same impression of the eternity of his own memory; but he will forget all except the very event of the action, like his grandsire. And yesterday evening, coming out from among the plaudits of the crowd that had been paying honor to the wonderful renderings of Couldock and Davidge in the "Chimney-Corner," Wetmore, the critic and habitue, did not even bring away a play-bill. That little domestic scene was so daguerreotyped upon his memory that he should never forget one detail of cast or incident—never! And yet five years hence, Wetmore will turn to some companion of the present and say: "Ah, confound it—I cannot remember! Whowasit that played with Couldock at the Winter Garden, in the—the—there, hang me if I have not even forgotten the name of the piece!—that capital little Robson domestic drama—the—the—the 'Chimney Corner'?"
So much by way of explanation, if not of apology, for catching the colors of the background of general feeling at the particular period of this story, before they have time to fade. And yet a few more words with reference to that general feeling, as it took particular directions.
"Vox populi, vox Dei" is a motto so often falsified, at least in appearance, that the world has come to place but little reliance upon it; and yet it is as true to-day as when the old Latin maximist first penned it, with the plurality of the gods of his dependence fully manifest in the original "Dii" or "Deis." The people do not often err materially or long. They may throne a wooden god or a baboon for a short moment, but that moment soon passes. As a political body no demagogue with words supplying the place of brains, can long override them; and as an army they never make a favorite of a fool or a coward. The American people did not err for a moment as to where the responsibility of the sad check to the army of the Potomac didnotbelong; and they erred but little in their calculation of where itdid. The army was brave—its leader was both careful and capable—the very man for the place: that they knew intuitively. They doubted the existence of brains at Washington, and of loyalty in many of those who had been urging "forward movements" without sufficient force or proper preparation; and they have already been fully justified in the doubt.
But the people saw something more—execrated it, howled against it, spat upon it; and after the Seven Days before Richmond, their abhorrence culminated. That terrible something wasabsenteeism. Thousands and tens of thousands who should have been in their places in the army, were shamelessly absent when their brothers-in-arms were being sacrificed from their very want of numbers. Wounded soldiers who had come home on furlough, and afterwards recovered, had never rejoined their commands; and in spite of the calls of McClellan no steps had been taken to force them back into the ranks. The Provost Marshals were too busy looking for summer-boarders at Fort Lafayette and Fort Warren, to think of their obvious duty of protecting the armies of the Union against indolence and desertion! A still more serious defection existed among the officers—those who had been awhile in the service, and those who had merely entered it inpretence. Half the New York regiments, especially, had originally been officered by men who had no intention of fighting, and who merely took commissions and spent a few weeks in camp or in the field of inactive operations, in order that they might have "Colonel," "Major," or "Captain" attached to their names, and be ready to make more successful plunges into the flesh-pots of well-paid offices, on the plea that they had been "patriots" and "served the country" in its need. Hundreds had come home, leaving their commands half-officered, on one pretext or another, and their leaves-of-absence obtained by more or less of political influence or favoritism. They never intended to go back; for were not the elections coming within a few months? and was it not necessary to plough the political field with those very harmless swords in order to raise a fall crop of offices?
Then the other class—those who had never intended to go at all—those who had no heart in the cause, from the first, and who had merely assumed the regulation uniform to feedvanityor thepocket. The former, to strut Broadway in unimpeachable blue-and-gold, be called by military titles, lounge at the theatres or create sensations at the watering-places, confident of being able to escape, on some pretext, before their commands (if they had any) should leave for the seat of war. The latter, to find profitable employment in raising companies, regiments or brigades, for Staten Island, East New York or the Red House, drawing pay and subsistence for twice or three times the number ever in camp, and coolly pocketing the difference! It is idle to talk, as exaggerating sensation-paragraphists sometimes do, of stealing the pennies off the eyes of a dead grandmother to play at pitch-and-toss, or forging the name of a buried father to a note and then allowing it to go to protest,—it is idle to talk of these as the extreme of criminal heartlessness: the men who could thus trade—the men whohavethus traded, during the whole war—on the public patriotism and the public necessity, would deserve the lowest deep in the pit of perdition, following upon leprosy in life and deaths on dunghills—if there was not a still deeper guilt on the souls of those who first plunged the country into war and then murdered it by treason or inefficiency.[7]
[7]January 17th, 1863.
[7]January 17th, 1863.
The public disgust at these "shoulder-straps" of both classes culminated during the first week of July. It might be unpatriotic and even cowardly to make no movement towards joining the Army of the Union: it was base and utterly contemptible to make such a movement merely as an injurious sham. So thought the people—seeing in thisdesire of military reputation and profit without service or sacrifice, the worm gnawing at the very heart of the republic. "If they are not soldiers, why do they wear these trappings of the battle-field?" asked the public. "If they are soldiers, why are they loitering here when their comrades are being overpowered and slaughtered?" Alas! the question has been continually asked and never answered. "Leipsic was lost, and I not there!" cried the soldier of the old French Eleventh, bursting into tears. But: "All the great battles of this war have been fought, and I have managed to keep out of them!" might the shoulder-strapped, belted, fatigue-capped, strutting mock-soldier of our own time say with a corresponding chuckle. God help us!—Rome had but one Nero fiddling when it burned, if history tells us true: we have had ten thousand military fiddlers playing away to admiring audiences duringourconflagration!
Is this to be a wholesale attack, then, on our national courage? Had we no brave men, then, that only these apologies for men are exhibited? Yes!—thousand upon thousand of brave men, and hundred upon hundred of brave officers—the world over no better or truer! But they were, as theyare, the men of action, not ofshow, or at least not of showalone.
One incident of the morning of the Second of July, when the Seven Days Battles were yet in progress before Richmond, will at once supply a few figures for this background, and an illustration of the public feeling for the soldiers of the little army of action and the great army of sham!
A few words had been permitted by the telegraph-censors to come through, and they had arrived too late for the morning papers. They were consequently bulletined. They gave some hint of the abandonment of the White House and the severe fighting which followed that movement, on Saturday and Sunday. They were not hopeful—they were discouraging—much worse, as it afterwards appeared, than the truth demanded; and the knit brows and set teeth of the readers did not show any symptoms of improvement under the new revelation.
A considerable group of men were standing about the "World" bulletin, stopping, reading and passing on—all the more slowly because the shade of the high building was refreshing in that hot, blinding, cloudless July morning sun. A group of politicians who had read the bulletins and taken their second breakfast at Crook and Duff's, were digesting the one and picking their teeth from the fragments of the other, before the door of that unaccountably-popular establishment, on the block above. Over the street from the "World" corner, at the Park fence, a dozen or two of invalid soldiers, with jaundiced faces and shabby uniforms, who had arrived by steamer from the South the day before and taken up their temporary abode in the dirty Barracks,—were standing lounging and listening to what was read from the bulletin; while a sentinel paraded up and down the walk, outside, to prevent escapes that did not seem over-probable. Voices were a little high, though not in disagreement, among the group at the corner—for they were discussing the very subject noted—that ofabsenteeism and military sham.
At that moment a good-looking young officer in spotless full uniform, with his cap so natty that the rain could never have been allowed to fall upon it, with his hair curled and his moustache trim as if he had been intended for any other description of "ball" than one met on the field of battle, and with a Captain's double-bars on his shoulder,—came across the Park from the direction of Broadway, over to the Beekman Street corner, as if to pass down that street. Some of the talkers noticed him, and connected him and his class a little injuriously with the events of the day. Just as he passed the corner, brushing very near some of the talkers and casting a hurried glance at the bulletin-board—one of the crowd, a rough fellow who might have belonged to the set who growled and hooted Coriolanus out of Rome,—broke out with:—
"There goes one of them, now!"
"Yes," muttered another, almost in front of the officer. "D—n 'em all! Much good those shiny uniforms are doing the country!"
The officer, who must have heard the words and known that they were intended for his ears, paid no attention and was passing on—the part of prudence and propriety, beyond a doubt. But one of the crowd was not satisfied. He must make wrong of the right (a thing very common in all causes) and the insult a personal one.
"See here!" and he laid his hand on the officer's arm, detaining him, but not roughly. "Do you see what there is on that bulletin?"
"I see!" said the Captain.
"Yes, they are cutting our boys all to pieces down there!" went on the aggrieved citizen.
"Well?" again said the officer, apparently neither angry nor frightened.
"Well!" spoke the other, repeating his word, but a little abashed by the calmness of the officer, whose arm he had let go the moment he turned to speak to him. "Well!—perhaps it is none of my business, you know—but why the d—l don't you fellows who have such handsome uniforms, and commissions, and all that sort of thing, go down and help?"
"Humph!" said the Captain, still with no symptom of being abashed or angry. "Perhaps itwouldbe as well, for all of us whocould."
"Oh, you can't go, eh?" said another member of the assemblage, in a sneering tone.
"Notyet!" was the reply of the officer.
"I thought not!" said the man who had first addressed him.
"See here, boys!" said the Captain, "haven't you made a mistake in your man? I hate a stay-at-home soldier, quite as much as you."
"Why don't you go, then?" one of the others again interrupted.
"I havebeen, and I amgoing again!" said the Captain, emphatically. "I see what is the matter. I have just put on a new uniform, and you think that looks suspicious. So it does, I suppose; but my old one has been through six pitched battles and looks rough enough to suit you."
"The d—l it has!" said the man who had addressed him. "Really, Captain, I beg your pardon!"
"Never mind that!" said the Captain. "You will probably hit the right man next time, and the quicker you shame the make-believes into doing something or pulling off their uniforms, the better. McClellan wants us all—"
"McClellan's the boy!" broke out a voice.
"You are right—'Little Mac's' the boy!" said the Captain. "He wants us all. The doctor told me this morning that I might go back, and I am going to-morrow."
"The doctor?—then you have been sick or wounded! What a fool I have been making of myself!" said the first speaker, generous as rough.
"A little!" answered the Captain, and by a dexterous movement he flung back his coat, threw open his collar and bared his neck almost to the shoulder. The whole top of the shoulder seemed to have been shot away, and the blade broken, by a ball that had struck him there and ploughed through into the neck; and the yet imperfectly healed flesh lay in torn ridges of ghastly disfigurement. Thousands of men have died from wounds of not half the apparent consequence; and yet the wearer of this was the smiling and even-tempered man of the new uniform—going back to-morrow! The world has not lost all its heroes yet; and some of them have the same fancy for a clean shirt and spotless broadcloth, when attainable, as Murat displayed for a velvet cloak, or white plume and plenty of gold embroidery on his trousers, when making the most reckless of charges at the head of the most dashing cavalry in the world. "That," said the Captain, closing up the wound as rapidly as he had opened it, but not before a general shudder had run through the crowd at its ghastly character—"that I got at Fair Oaks, three weeks ago last Sunday. How do you like it? Am I going back soon enough? Good morning, boys!"
"And your name?" asked the man who had stopped him, as he attempted to pass on. "Who are you?—Do tell us."
"Nobody that you would know," said the Captain. "My name is D——, and I belong to the Sickles Brigade."
He passed on, hurriedly, down Beekman Street, as if "Little Mac" had sent for him and he had been wasting time in going; but the cheer that went after him was joined in by the invalids at the Park fence, who had caught a part of the dialogue; and the people in the "World" office looked up from their account books, wondering what was the matter in the street; while the politicians in front of Crook and Duff's, among whom were some of the City Fathers and their backers and bottle-holders, losing the other part of the affair and only hearing the shouts, wondered whether some new notability had not just arrived at the Astor House, who could be turned to profitable use in the way of a reception in the Governor's Room, a few "Committees," gloves, carriages from Van Ranst and a dinner or two all around—of course at the expense of the economically-managed city treasury.
And this closes a chapter which has made no direct progress whatever in following the leading characters of this story, who must now be again taken up in their order.
Following up the Prince Street Mystery—Tom Leslie's Peculiar Ideas—A Call upon Superintendent Kennedy—The Departure of a Regiment—Josey Harris in a Street-Squall—A Rencontre.
It was not to be supposed that Tom Leslie and Walter Lane Harding, after the expenditure of ten dollars, a whole night's rest and a considerable amount of bodily energy, in the investigation of what they called the 'Prince Street mystery,' would permit it to remain uninvestigated afterwards, so far as a little more money and a good deal more of inquisitiveness could go in unravelling it. Even before they parted, late on the night of the adventure, they had discussed half a dozen plans for gaining admission to the house on Prince Street or that on East 5—th, by fair means or foul. Harding, who was something of a stickler for propriety in ordinary cases, in spite of the fact that he had on that one occasion been inveigled into following a carriage and playing spy under a front stoop—Harding expressed himself satisfied that there being now in their minds a sufficient certainty of the existence of a disloyal organization in the city to make affidavits to that effect a duty—the proper course would be to lay the matter at once before the Superintendent of Police and request that a watch might be set upon the houses or some proceedings taken to "work up" the case for after proceedings. The young merchant no doubt had more confidence in this plan than he might otherwise have done, from the fact that a few months previous a robbery had been committed at his place of business, and that upon his laying the matter at once before the police authorities, such steps had been taken as within two weeks secured the detection of the leading culprit and the recovery of most of the missing property. Here was a detective "bridge" that had once "carried him safe over" in a commercial point of view: why would not the same bridge offer both of them a safe footing when attempting to unravel a mystery of disloyalty?
Tom Leslie, as was natural to one of his temperament, took a different view of the whole matter. Mysteries "bothered" the straight-forward Harding; but to Tom they formed one of the necessities of existence—a little less indispensable than his breakfast, but much more important than his cigar. Had he been precisely the sort of man for employing police agency where personal investigation was possible, he would never have climbed the tree in Prince Street or dragged Harding under the stoop of the brown-stone house. He suggested that Harding would not have much difficulty in making himself up for a postman, and getting inside the up-town house in that capacity, trusting to his own skill toremainwithin until he had made the necessary investigations; while as for himself—well, he had no particular objections to entering temporarily upon the occupation of a tinker or a gatherer of old rags and bottles, with a disguise from his friend Williams, the costumer, and working the basement of the house on Prince Street, and the domestics therein employed, in one of those capacities. He had no doubt whatever that if he could only succeed in concealing himself in the sub-cellar or the coal-vault, until the house should be closed for the night, he could then, with the aid of a few matches and a pair of list slippers carried in the pocket, make a "rummage" of the premises which must prove eminently satisfactory. He did not seem to labor under any fear that the little accident of being discovered while lying perdu or while making his explorations, and arrested and sent to Blackwell's Island as an ordinary sneak-thief, might possibly stand in the way. In fact, if all stories of his earlier life were to be credited, he had taken some pains, in more than one instance, to be arrested by the Police under what appeared to be suspicious circumstances, spend a night in the station-house, and astound the Police Justices, who personally knew him somewhat too well for their comfort, by his appearance as a very woe-begone culprit in the morning. "De gustibus non est," etc.—there is really no disputing about tastes, since St. Simeon Stylites roosted upon the top of a very inconvenient pillar, and the first ostrich inaugurated the dietary proclivities of the race by gobbling down a small cart-load of cord-wood with a garnish of a peck of paving-stones! A night in a station-house may not be so very unpleasant a thing, when taken from choice and with a certainty of the door being laughingly opened in the morning: Whiskey Tom or Scratching Sall, who visit the institution perforce, for small burglaries or big vagrancies, with a prospect of "six months" or "two years" at the end, may form a very different opinion of it!
Tom Leslie, as has been remarked, did not seem to have any fears of such a result as an arrest, to his proposed spy-movements; but it cannot be concealed that for a moment Walter Harding, who had before thought that he knew him well, looked at him out of the corners of his eyes, with some impression that he must unwittingly have been keeping company with a genteel house-breaker. At all events, Harding did not fall in with the spy-proposition, so far as his own action was concerned, alleging that there might be such a thing as a business man having other occupations than traversing the city in disguise as a volunteer detective; and so that project, if any there had really been in the mind of Leslie, was abandoned.
A resort to the police remained; for neither of the friends, after what they had seen and heard, could think of the whole affair being allowed to go by default. Superintendent Kennedy must be visited, after all; and though Harding's business for the next day would interfere, it was more than half agreed upon before they separated, that they would call together upon that official on the next day but one and lay the whole matter before him.
The agreement, though only half made, was better kept than many that are made more conclusively; for at eleven o'clock on the day named Leslie made his appearance at the place of business of Harding, and dragged him away from a series of mercantile calculations over the desk, in which he had more than half forgotten the existence of his friend as well as the whole adventure of the chase and the mystery. He came up to the work pretty readily, however—the presence of the rattling, go-ahead Leslie always having the effect of carrying him a little off his feet; and half an hour afterwards the two friends had entered that melancholy-looking five-story brick building on the corner of Broome and Elm, then and till lately known as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police,—and were being shown by a policeman in attendance, with the blue of his suit undimmed by exposure to the weather and the brass of his buttons radiantly untarnished, into the presence of John A. Kennedy, Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police District and for the time Provost Marshal of the City of New York. They entered from the hall of the building by a side door to the left, in the rear of what had been the centre of the house when occupied as a private residence before New York moved up "above Bleecker,"—and advancing towards the front under the guidance of the respectful official, passed the table at which sat the half-bald, stern-faced, and iron-gray Deputy Superintendent Carpenter, through the door that had once separated the two parlors, and stood in the presence of another iron-gray man, seated writing at a table covered with books and papers, his back to the front of the building, and the smooth-shaven and round-faced Inspector Leonard busily examining a roll of papers behind him in the corner.
Few men in this whole country have occupied a more marked position in the public mind, during all this struggle, than Superintendent Kennedy, in his legitimate position at the head of the Police and in what we must believe to have been his illegitimate one as Provost Marshal. He made himself peculiarly conspicuous, and won the enmity of all the secession wing of the Northern democracy, by stopping the shipment of arms to the rebellious States, and blocking the apparent game of Mayor Wood and his aiders and abettors to curry favor with the extreme South by truckling to every one of its arrogant dictations. The enmity then created has never died, and can never die until those who hold it happen to die themselves. At the same time, those who were and are unconditionally loyal to the Union, have never judged the action of Superintendent Kennedy very harshly—aware thatsomethingneeded to be done to prevent the existing evil, and that only a man of his indomitable "pluck" could be found to apply the remedy at such a period.
A somewhat broader and more general charge has since been preferred against him—that in the exercise of the duties of Provost Marshal, which he assumed without propriety, he showed himself a willing tool of governmental despotism and displayed indefensible harshness and arrogance. There is something of truth in this charge, beyond a question,—as the impossibility of "touching pitch" without being "defiled," applies to intercourse with wrong-doers high in power as well as to those in lower station. The station-houses of the New York police were certainly made receptacles for accused parties whose crimes were very different from those contemplated in their erection,—just as the forts in the harbors of New York and Boston have been made "Bastilles" for state-prisoners whose arrests were signally reckless and improper. Many of the prisoners, in both cases, have deserved more than all the punishment received; but the blind uncertainty as to their guilt, and the impossibility of discovering even the nature of the charges against them, have made those imprisonments equally indefensible and dangerous, and brought them at last to their end.
There is a woman at the bottom of almost every revolution—political as well as social. Tradition tells us, though history is silent on the subject, that the sad fate of the daughter of a French citizen, flung into the Bastille for alleged complicity in a conspiracy during the early days of Louis XVI., and dying there—rankled in the minds of the Parisians much more than the wrongs done to thousands of brave and noble men during the centuries previous, and furnished the burden of the terrible cry with which the men of 1789 thundered at the walls of that old fortress of feudal oppression, and with which they butchered not only De Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, but Flesselles, theProvost Marshal. The case of a woman—Mrs. Brinsmaid—was the last drop in the cup of endurance, here, and the event which we believe was finally and forever to close the melancholy doors of Lafayette and Warren, against arrest without charge and imprisonment without trial—spite of indemnity bills passed and unlimited powers conferred upon the President by a mad Congress.
Through all this, meanwhile, John A. Kennedy was unquestionably more sinned against than sinning—made the tool of worse and more unscrupulous men, who used his hard conscientiousness and his narrow bigotry of mind, fostered by too long and too close connection with the lodges of secret societies—to carry out their own designs of despotism, without the nobility to stand between him and his possible sacrifice for obeying the very orders they had given. He is not the first man who has been misused and placed in a false position, nor the last, as a later victim of blind confidence and obedience, Burnside,[8]is very likely to bear sad witness.
[8]January 25th, 1863.
[8]January 25th, 1863.
But all this while, for the purposes of this narrative, Tom Leslie and his friend Harding have been standing unnoticed in the presence of the Superintendent. Not very long in reality—scarcely longer than enabled them to note the hair and closely-cut full beard of iron gray, the keen but troubled eyes, that had scarcely yet ceased to moisten at the memory of the loss of a dearly loved brother,[9]the face care-worn and anxious, and the shoulders bent over a little as he sat,—scarcely longer time than this was given them, when the Superintendent laid down his pen and said, sharply and decisively:
"Well, gentlemen?"
[9]Col. William D. Kennedy, of the Tammany Regiment.
[9]Col. William D. Kennedy, of the Tammany Regiment.
There was nothing very cordial in the tone, and no indication that the Superintendent considered it peculiarly his place to listen to all the persons who came to him upon business; but perhaps this comparativebrusquerieis necessary, in the carrying on of any important department, to discourage bores and send idle people the sooner about their business. It does not add to popularity, however, and may add materially to the opposite.
Under such circumstances, it did not need a very long period of time for Tom Leslie, with the occasional assistance of Harding, whose memory was much more accurate if not more retentive—to convey to the Superintendent the main facts of their midnight adventure, with the impression that adventure had made, of some disloyal movements going on in the City, and probably with extended ramifications elsewhere. Except to say that one of the women seen on that evening had before fallen under his notice in Europe. Leslie did not allude to the episode of the "red woman," nor did he enter into the particulars of his previous meetings with Dexter Ralston, though he asserted his knowledge of him as a Virginian of peculiar influence and a very ambiguous position. The Superintendent showed few signs of interest in the narration, though his sharp eye occasionally glanced at the face of the principal narrator, and though he two or three times made motions with the pencil lying before him, which might have been merely listless occupation of his fingers and might have been something very different.
"Well, gentlemen," said the Superintendent, when they had concluded. "It is certainly a strange story you have been telling, and of course I do not question the entire veracity of your narration of what you saw orthoughtyou saw. But there is nothing proved, so far, that could justify any arrest, even if we could find the persons to arrest. I do not see that there is anythingIcould do in the matter."
"I told you so!" said Leslie in a low voice to his friend. He had opposed coming to the Superintendent at all, be it remembered.
"Nothing?—not even to set a watch upon the two houses we have named?" asked Harding, a good deal surprised and not a little out of temper.
"Humph!" answered the Superintendent. "This is not France under the Empire, and I am not Fouché."
"The latter part of that sentence may probably be true: I have my doubts about the other!" thought Tom Leslie, though he waited a more prudent occasion for communicating the thought to Harding.
"And so, Mr. Superintendent, you consider all this of no consequence?" said Harding, going back to first principles, and not by any means improving in the matter of temper.
"I did not say anything of the kind!" answered the Superintendent, his face sterner but his voice even as before. "I said there was nothing upon which I could act, and the police force of the district is scarcely sufficient to set a watch around all the houses that may happen to have traitors in them. I would advise you to say nothing of this affair to any other persons, if you have not yet done so; and if you see or hear of anything more thatwillseem to justify an arrest, communicate with this office again."
He did not say "good morning!" as a sign of dismissal, but his manner indicated as much, and the two friends left him with merely an additional nod. Harding was in decided dudgeon as the policeman of the bright blue cloth and the unimpeachable buttons accompanied them to the door, and muttered something very like "I'm d—d if Idocommunicate with that office again, in a hurry!" Leslie, who had seen more of police operations, both abroad and at home, than his friend, and who had expected little or nothing else from the first,—kept his good humor admirably; and he bored Harding, before they had walked from the office to Broadway, with the information that that was about all the thanks any man ever received for attempting to do a service to government or individuals, and a relation of how at Naples a couple of years before, he had attempted to save the life of an Englishman threatened with assassination, and been arrested and very nearly imprisoned for an attempt to stab the man himself, with his penknife or tooth-pick—he never knew precisely which!
The two friends were scarcely in the street, when the Superintendent called sharply:
"Mr. Carpenter!"
The Deputy was in the room in a moment. The Superintendent was writing a few words on a piece of paper.
"You heard the story those men were telling?"
"A part of it—perhaps all," answered the Deputy.
"There may be something in it—I think thereis," continued the Superintendent. "At all events, put those two houses"—handing him the slip of paper—"under close watch, and discover who enters and who leaves them, and at what hours. Put B—— and another good man in charge of the Prince Street house, and L—— and another good man at the one in East 5— Street. That is all."
The Deputy merely bowed and returned to his own table, beckoning to one of the policemen near the door and giving the necessary orders to carry out the directions of his superior. So that almost by the time the two friends reached Broadway, and certainly some time before Leslie concluded his illustrative narration of police management in Naples, the arrangement for which they had especially come, and which had been apparently denied, was already in active operation. The reasons which had induced the Superintendent to underrate to Harding and Leslie the importance of the intelligence he had just received, or which had led to so sudden a change of mind, will probably remain a mystery even after the profounder mysteries of governmental management during the war are brought into broad daylight. There is no Sphynx like your "man in authority," whether his reasons for silence be that he does not wish others to know his intentions, or that hedoes not know them himself.
It was perhaps one o'clock when the two friends reached Broadway and turned downward to return to their different places of business—Harding of course to his store near the Hospital, and Leslie to his little desk in the office of theDaily Thundergust, or anywhere else in the more frequented parts of the town, where he might chance to pick up material for an item or an article. Broadway at that point and at that moment presented an appearance that used to be extraordinary, but that of late months has been almost as common as its ordinary crowded condition. One of the Eastern regiments, that had just landed at the New Haven Railroad Depot, was on its way down to the Park Barracks, and the police had been clearing the street of omnibuses and carriages to make room for them. The sidewalks on both sides were pretty well filled with spectators—idlers who never find anything better to do than gazing at street spectacles, and people of both sexes, with more or less of business on hand, who cannot avoid pausing for a moment when the police sweep by to clear the street and the tap of the bass-drum is heard,—just to see what the excitement is all about. In this instance a file of policemen extending almost from curb to curb were marching abreast to keep the way clear in front of the regiment; close behind them sounded the crashing of brass, the screaming of clarionet-reeds and the tap of drums; and a little farther behind, over the heads of the advancing column, a couple of flags caught the sun and waved softly in the light summer air—one the glorious old banner, with its three colors that blend truth, purity and devotion till death,—and the other a fringed and tasselled embroidery of dark blue silk, bearing the peculiar arms of the one State that was sending forth more of its bravest sons to do battle for all.
"A Massachusetts regiment," said Harding. "One was to come down by the New Haven Road, this morning."
"Yes," said Leslie. "You can afford half an hour more, while I can afford all day if I wish. Let us wait until the show passes." They paused accordingly and took shelter beside a lamp-post against the downward pressure of the sidewalk crowd that was coming.
Nearer came the soldiers, their long line of sloped bayonets glancing off the sunbeams with a peculiarly threatening aspect, and their equipments showing the perfection which has been accorded by the Old Bay State to all her troops, in contradistinction to the men of some of the other States, that have been allowed to go down to the conflict looking more like a mob of scarecrows than a body of trained soldiers. The Colonel, who rode first, lolled easily on his saddle, like one who had not mounted a horse for the first time when he first put on his sword-belts; the Captains of the various companies stepped out boldly and clearly in front of their men, turning occasionally to see that the line was properly kept; and the rank and file tramped on, their step almost steady enough for the march of veteran troops, and the dull thunder of the fall of each thousand of feet on the solid pavement, making the most impressive sound in the world except that supplied by the multitudinous clink of the iron hoofs of a cavalry squadron passing over the same stony road.
It was an impressive spectacle, like all of the same kind that have preceded and followed it—a glorious spectacle, when the faces of most of the men were observed, and nothing of the despairing dullness of the conscript's eye seen there, but the vigorous pride and determination of men who were going forth at the call of their country to battle for that country to the death. And yet a sad spectacle, as all the others have been, when waste of life and mismanagement of power were taken into the account, and when the thinned ranks that should return, of the full ranks that went so proudly away, came to be remembered. Something of this latter feeling, and the peculiarities of the time, made the waving of handkerchiefs and the clapping of hands less frequent and cordial than the fine-looking fellows and their excellent appointments really deserved.
"The d—l take the politics and policy of Massachusetts!" broke out Tom Leslie, when the array had half passed. "I do not like her, and never did. But shedoessend out troops as the old Trojan horse poured out heroes; shedoesknow how to equip and take care of them, aswedo not; and theyfight—oh, Harding, don't they?"
"Not any better than most of our New York troops, I fancy!" replied Harding, an incarnate New Yorker, to the last observation.
"Not better, perhaps, but more steadily—not so dashingly, but more inevitably," said Leslie, going into one of his fits of abstract philosophy, where he must perforce be followed, like a maniac by his keeper. "Our New York boys go into the fight more as a spree—the New Englanders more as a duty. Our boys enjoy it—they endure it; and some one else than myself must decide which is the higher order of courage. Almost all the New Englanders are comparatively fanatics, while we have very few indeed, unless it may be fanaticism to worship the old flag—God bless it! If it could have been possible for England to be plunged into a general war with some other country, immediately after the Restoration, something like this same distinction would have been seen. Sir Gervase Langford would have charged upon the foe, his feathers flying and his lady's colors woven into a love-knot above his cuirass, singing a roundelay of decidedly loose tendencies, precisely as he had once charged beside Prince Rupert on the bloody day of Long Marston; and Master John Grimston would have snuffled a psalm through his nose and made a thanksgiving prayer over a cut throat, swinging his long two-handed sword meanwhile, as he had done when mowing down the 'malignants' at Naseby, under the very eye of Oliver himself. That would have been an odd mixture for the same army; but we have an odder, when the neat-whiskered clerk from behind the dry-goods counter in this city—the rough fisherman from Cape Cod—the lumberman from the forests of Maine—and the long, gangling squirrel-hunters from the wilds of Wisconsin,—all meet together to fight for the same cause."
"True," said Harding—"true. And I suppose that fanaticismdoesfight well. It has no fear of death, and very little of consequences. How much difference was there, I wonder, between Ali at the head of his Moslem horde, fresh from the teachings of Mohammed himself, and fully impressed with the belief that if he died he should go at once to the company of the Houris in Paradise,—and Cromwell—or Old John Brown—in a corresponding madness of supposed Christianity? Not much, eh?"
"Not much—none at all!" replied Leslie. "But see how long this one regiment has been in filing past. Only one regiment—not much more than a thousand men, and yet the street seems full of the glisten of their bayonets for half-a-mile. We have grown used to handling the phrases 'thirty thousand,' 'fifty thousand,' 'one hundred thousand,' or even 'a quarter of a million' of men, just as glibly as we speak of one, two or ten millions of money; and yet we realize very little of the force of those numbers. Fifty thousand men are considered to be no army—nothing more than a skirmishing party, now-a-days; and yet to form it, forty or fifty such bodies of men as that which has just passed us must be included. Is it any wonder—after studying a thousand men in this manner—that while we have many generals capable of managing five or ten thousand, very few can command fifty thousand without making a mess of it, and a hundred thousand succeeds in crazing almost every one of our commanders?"
"Wonder? No, I should think not," said Harding, laughing. "I have puzzle enough, sometimes, with even that number offigures, and I should make a bad muddle of handling that quantity of men. But, by the way, did you ever read that singular novel, 'Border War,' by a South-western writer, Jones, published several years ago?"
"I have skimmed it—never read it," said Leslie. "Remarkable book, I should say, to be read over now-a-days, when the event then handled as romance has become reality!"
"The numbers of his opposing forces, as compared with the actual armies of the present day, are the great point of interest," said Harding. "He makes terrible blunders in guessing at the great battle-ground of the war, as he lays the principal battles in Upper Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and does not seem to contemplate the possibility of there being any fighting onSouthernsoil. But his numbers—I think he made each of the opposing forces number some one hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand men; and a sharp reviewer broke out into a loud guffaw over the impossibility that any such number of men could ever be arrayed against each other, on the soil of the United States, by any possible convulsion. Only a few years have passed, and we have three or four times his numbers in the fight on either side, with half a million more men to be called for."
"We are travelling fast—that is all," replied Leslie.
"You couldn't exactly inform mewhere, could you?" asked Harding. "But,—phew!—w!—w!" looking at his watch, "the soldiers are gone and time is up; I must look after my deposits before three."
"And what are we to do about our mystery?" asked Leslie, as the other was about to leave him. "Give that up altogether?—or will you agree to take a hand in at personal investigation?"
"Yes—no—I really do not know what to say, Tom!" was the reply of Harding. "At all events, I have spent all the time I can spare to-day, looking after that and the soldiers. 'Business first and pleasure afterwards,' you know."
"Yes," said Leslie, "as the excellent Duke of Gloster remarked, when he first killed the old King and then murdered the young Princes."
"Pshaw!" replied Harding, "I think I may have heard that before."
"Very possibly," said Leslie, too much used to slight rebuffs to pay them any great attention.
"Well, I shall walk down faster than you—bye-bye, old fellow. Look in at my place to-morrow and let us see whether we can arrange to do anything more in opposition to His High Mightiness Superintendent and Provost Marshal Kennedy," said Harding, moving away.
"Look! look! over there!" said Leslie, just as his friend was leaving him. "There is a piece of infernal impudence!"
The two friends were yet on the East side of Broadway, as they had come out from Broome Street. The procession had passed from the street, and the crowd on the sidewalks had materially cleared away. Leslie had been looking across at the passengers on the "shilling side." Two ladies, neatly dressed in street costume, and wearing light gypsies, were walking together, downward. Behind them, and so close that he nearly trod upon their dresses, a tall man was walking apparently upon tip-toe and leaning over so that his head was almost between theirs. He was evidently not of their party—was apparently listening to their conversation and scanning the necks and busts before him somewhat too closely; they all the while unconscious what a miserable libel on humanity was dogging them. He looked foreign—perhaps French, especially in the extraordinary curve and bell of his black round hat,—was well-dressed, and seemed to be gray-haired enough to know better.
"Impudence? I should think so," replied Harding, as he caught sight of the two girls and their unobserved follower. "That dirty hound would rob a church! Oh, if I could only see that taller one turn around, now, and fetch him such a slap in the face that it would ring for a twelvemonth! Why, by Heavens, Leslie!" he said, looking closer. "I ought to know that figure, and Ido. Come over, and let us see the end of this."
"And your bank account?" asked Leslie.
"Oh, never mind that—come along!" and in half a minute they were across the street and close behind the ladies and their persecutor. The latter kept his place, dodging his head around at every opportunity as if to get a sight of the face of the taller girl, and both apparently yet unconscious of his presence.
"Do you see a policeman?" asked Harding, in a low voice. "I will have that fellow taken up."
"Not a policeman!" answered Leslie. "If you know either of the ladies, take the scoundrel by the collar, or letme."
"Idoknow the taller girl," said Harding, "and—"
Suddenly he was interrupted. The taller lady on the outside wheeled around so suddenly as almost to throw the tip-toe follower off his feet, confronted him boldly, flung up the short light veil that depended from her gypsy and partially hid her features, ineffable scorn and delicious impudence dancing at the same moment out of her dark eyes and flushed cheeks,—and burst out with:
"You have followed me long enough. Perhaps you want a better look? Here it is! How do you like me?"
"Oh, Joe!" said the other lady, almost sinking with fright.
"Upon my honor, miss—ladies—it was all a mistake—I was not following you—that is—I thought—"
"You are lying, sir, and you know it!" spoke the strange girl, the words fairly hissing from her red lips and the coming tears already combating with anger in her voice. "You have followed us for more than a block, leaning over our very shoulders, and if I was only a man I would flog you within an inch of your life!" Here pride and shame overcame anger, and the tears burst out in spite of her; so that by the time she had concluded she was nearly as weak and helpless as her frightened companion.
The sneaking scoundrel attempted to get away, not less from the anger of the outraged girl than from the passers-by, a dozen or two of whom had already collected; but before he could make any movement in that direction, a hand—that of Walter Harding, was laid on his collar, swinging him violently around; and a small Malacca cane—that of Tom Leslie, was laid about his shoulders and back with such good will that the human hound literally yelled with pain. "Serve him right!" "Give it to him!" and other exclamations of the same character, broke from those who had heard the girl's words and who saw the punishment; and in thirty seconds he was perhaps as thoroughly-flogged a man as Broadway ever saw. Then Harding released him with a kick, and he made three howling leaps to an omnibus passing up, and disappeared inside. The impression on the minds of the spectators was that he would not much enjoy his ride; and they no doubt had another impression in which we may fully share, that though vulgarism is "bred in the bone and will come out in the flesh," yet the flogged man would be very careful of the locality in which he again indulged in the same atrocious habit.
All this time the taller girl, though endeavoring to control her emotion, was literally sobbing with shame and anger, while yet half-laughing at the sudden punishment of her persecutor. The other lady had been too much frightened to utter a second exclamation, and neither had paid any attention to the personality of their defenders.
But at this stage of the proceedings, Walter Harding lifted his hat (his hands having been too busy before) and approached the taller lady.
"Miss Harris, if I am not mistaken."
"Harris—that is my name, certainly," said the lady, "and you do not know how much we thank you for your kindness, but—"
"But you don't remember me, eh?" This was said with a smile that brought some new expression to his face, and the wild girl instantly cried:
"Yes, I do remember you—you are—you are—" but she had not yet recovered the name from the mists of forgetfulness, if she remembered the face.
"Walter Harding, merchant, of this city, Miss Josephine, and very glad to meet you again, even under such circumstances."
"Mr. Harding—oh yes, what a crazy head I have!" said the lady, smiles now altogether taking the place of the struggling tears, and giving him both her hands with the freedom of a school-girl—either in acknowledgment of his late service or as an apology for her momentary forgetfulness. "Mr. Harding, of course! Newport—Purgatory—Dumpling Rocks—everywhere—what fish we caught and what a jolly month we had—didn't we? And then to think that I should have forgotten you, even for a moment!"
The explanation of which is, that Walter Lane Harding had met Miss Josephine Harris at Newport, in the summer of 1860, and that they had been much pleased with the society of each other and companions in many a stroll and fishing-excursion. Probably neither believed, when they parted, that two years would elapse without another meeting; but in the great Babel of city life it is only occasionally that we can manage to make ourselves heard by each other, above the clattering of the hammers and the confusion of tongues. Had they been lovers, they would have found each other before, no matter what stood in the way; but friendships, even the warmest, have little of the fierce energy of love, and a very cobweb mesh of circumstances or business engagements can bind the sentiment, while there is no cord spun in the long rope-walk of life, strong enough to fetter the free limbs of the passion. That Walter Harding and Josephine Harris had only met by accident after two years, and yet both living in the same city and moving in the same walk of society—proved that they might havelikedbut had neverloved.
The few passers-by who had collected around the ladies at the time of the insult, had separated when they proved to be in the company of male acquaintances; and in a moment after the recognition between Harding and Joe Harris, the latter had introduced Miss Bell Crawford, the heroine of the cerise ribbon, to both the gentlemen; and she had received an introduction which caused her to start and color singularly the moment their eyes met—to Mr. Tom Leslie, traveler, newspaper-correspondent, Jack-at-all-trades and general good fellow. Was that interested and conscious look repaid by another on the part of Tom Leslie, or had he had sufficient time after seeing the young girl and before speaking to her, to recover from any agitation, pleasurable or the contrary, incident to the meeting? Did they know each other or only somethingofeach other? Had they met before, and if so, when and where? Perhaps some light may be thrown on all these questions, a little later in the progress of this story.
At the present juncture two of the parties were hungry; the third what is called "peckish," which means alittlehungry and quite capable of bolting a sandwich or the wing of a cold turkey; and the fourth very much in a hurry and anxious to get away to his business.
"We sent our carriage home, knowing that we could not get through Broadway while the troops were passing," said Bell Crawford, "with orders to have it call for us late in the afternoon, at a friend's house near Union Square. We were just going down to Taylor's for a little lunch, when this awkward affair occurred: may we ask you to join us, gentlemen?"
"Oh yes," said Josephine Harris, with her school-girl pleasure at the proposition ill-concealed. "That will be—yes, well, I may as well say out what I think—that will be jolly."
"As for my friend Leslie here," said Harding, "hehas nothing to do, and can certainly ask no greater pleasure than to join you. We were just about separating when we saw you. For myself, Imustforego the pleasure, for I have the misfortune to be a busy man, and I must really wish you a hurried good-morning, leaving you in my friend's care."
With a promise to call upon the ladies at his earliest convenience, the young merchant hurried away, with every evidence that his thoughts were intent upon the balance at his banker's and the question whether certain regular customers who were to have called during the morning had been duly impressed by his clerks with the merits of certain choice styles of goods, rapidly on the rise, that he would himself have commended to their particular attention. And yet there are odd mixtures, sometimes, even in the minds of merchants—mixtures in which customers become blended with curls and profits with profiles; for Walter Lane Harding, as he wasted yet one more moment to step into Gilsey's and light a choice Havana, indulged in a train of thought which might have been shaped into words something in the manner following:
"A pretty woman—that Miss Crawford, decidedly ladylike—which the other isnot, however pleasant a companion. I should as soon think of falling in love with a handsome bombshell, as withher. No knowing when she might explode. Now if I had metMiss Crawfordat Newport two years ago, who knows but affairs might have been different? Heigho!" And so Walter Harding went on to his business; while Tom Leslie, the member of the party who was "peckish," accompanied the two girls, who were decidedly hungry, to that over-gilt and tawdry caricature upon some of the palace-halls of the Old World, known as "Taylor's Saloon."
Some Reflections on Comparative Character—Of Houses as Well as Men—Temptation, and the Legends of the "Lurley" and the "Frozen Hand"—A Lunch at Taylor's, and an Arrangement.
In the "great day of final assize," when beneath the one unerring Eye and Hand all the drosses of life and circumstance shall be melted away and all the films and disfigurements removed from action and intention,—there will be many things, we have reason to believe, shown in a widely different light from that in which human eyes have looked upon them. Human character will surprise the beholders, if it does not produce the same effect even upon the subject under examination. Many a poor wretch who has been stumbling along through life, unfortunate and apparently guilty, of no seeming use either to himself or the world, will be found to have filled a place of necessity not suspected—to have done much good and very little harm—and to have been acting from motives quite as pure as those that in other hearts have produced such different effects. Many a "good" man will be stripped so bare of the garments woven around him by circumstances or his own self-righteousness, and so many of his best deeds will be proved to have proceeded from selfish, interested and unholy motives, that every success and every word of past approbation will be a reproach, and his naked soul will stand shivering in the chilling breath of God's displeasure.
It is not exactly certain thathouseswill come to judgment; but if they do, there will be the same marked difference in the estimation in which many of them have been held by the community surrounding them, and the truth of their influence shown in the "sunlight of the eternal morning." Some miserable tenant-house in Bermondsey or the Swamp, overcrowded with human rats, its atmosphere so noisome that fever floated on every breath and the passer-by from Belgravia or Murray Hill put his perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils to escape the deadly infection,—may be found to have been far less injurious to the neighborhood than the corner-house on Park Lane or the double-front of brown stone within the shadow of Dr. Spring's church on Fifth Avenue. Within the one the miserable occupants may have festered in body and rotted in soul—harming only themselves and the physical atmosphere meanwhile, and victims of the horrible aggregation of poverty in great cities; while within the other a maelstrom of pleasant dissipation has been whirling, to which the victims came in their own carriages with full liveries, the waves as they circled sending up jets of cooling spray and redolent of perfumes from the flowers of sunny lands—but continually widening its circle of evil attraction and drawing in those who thenceforth had no power of resistance against the banded demons of wine, of play and of lascivious enjoyment, who lurked beneath the waters, eager for their prey.
The fable of the "Lurline" is the story of human life and temptation; and yet few of the thousands who have read it in the old German legend of the "Lurleiberg" or the charming "Bridal of Belmont" of the author of "Lillian," or who have gazed at it for hours when presented upon the stage in the shape of "Ondine" or the "Naiad Queen,"—have fully realized its significance. To most it has been merely a pretty conceit or an effective spectacle; to the close student it is an absorbing picture of the enthralment of human energies. Sir Huldebrand of Kingstettin is a true as well as a valiant knight, and he has a golden-haired and white-handed ladie-love in the neighboring castle of the Baron of Steinbrunnen. He has a hope, a love, a faith, a duty; and on the day when he fares forth from Kingstettin and takes his way to the river bank, he has mirth as well as all these, for Karl, his merry servant, is beside him. But the day is hot and sultry, and he dismounts from his horse and lies down to sleep beside the Lurleiberg. He has granted himself rest and indulgence. Half in his sleep and half in his waking thought he sees the stream rippling below the banks and circling in pleasant eddies by rock and mossy edge, while the water-lilies nestle down their soft cheeks to the lapping water in the sheltered nooks, and the willows bend down and kiss the stream with the swaying tips of their hundred fingers, and little gleams of golden sunshine steal through the branches and touch the soft ripples here and there with such tints of transparent light as the pencil of painter never mastered. Oh, how deliciously sweet and dreamy is that half wakeful feeling of repose and indulgence! And then the music rises—gentle and almost undistinguishable at first from the singing ripple of the water—then clearer and more distinct, but with still a tinkling ripple in every cadence, and the name of the listener insensibly blended. Flattery has come with indulgence, and the subtle wine of its intoxication is mounting to his brain. Then he turns dreamily on his couch of moss, and looks over the bank into the river. Above the water white hands are circling and snowy bosoms are gleaming, and in the midst is one form of matchless rounded beauty, with a face of angelic splendor, her eye-lids gemmed with the tear-drops of an awakened affection, and her waved brown hair caressed by the tide as it sweeps backward. All the white hands are beckoning to him, and all the coral lips are uttering those low musical words in which his name is blended. The brain of the knight grows dizzy—chains of which he only feels a pleasure in the slight pressure, twine around his limbs. Voluptuous enjoyment takes the place of energy—he is himself no longer. He cannot even laugh—he can only sigh—Karl has gone chasing some Lurline of his own, far down the meadow. Ermengarde, who has been for hours leaning out of the high window at Steinbrunnen, and looking anxiously for her expected lover—is nothing to him now. His promised aid to Sir Rudolph to-morrow, with helm on brow and lance in rest, against the invader who threatens the lands of both with ravage, is nothing to him now. Love and duty are alike forgotten. The temptation has done its full work through indolence and indulgence, and the knight is lost. The brown-haired Lurline is worth all earth and heaven. Let all the rest go, without a sigh or a regret—be his the murmur of the river, the delicious music embodying his name, and the beckoning of the white hands towards him! He does not leap into the water, as some have held: he merely bends nearer to the verge, then slips down with eager eyes and outstretched hands; the white arms twine around him; the music sounds for one moment more sweetly but more sadly than ever, as the waves close above the pair so unholily wedded; then the ripples sing on and all is quiet beauty as before—calm and quiet beauty, as if no tomb had closed above the energies of a human soul.
Sir Huldebrand may come back again, after a time, as the legend is fond of making him do. He may even marry the golden-haired Ermengarde and sire children to heir his lands and perpetuate his name. But the knight is himself a wreck, with all his best energies burnt out in those weird orgies beneath the water; and his bridal vow is a hollow one, for when he utters it he hears the shriek of the Lurline blending with the wedding music, and his nightly couch is to be henceforth a torture of unrest—his ride by day a mere hopeless fleeing from the ghosts of dead pleasures.
Something of the same character is that other wild legend which has grown into song and drama—sprung from the Norse branch of the great German mind,—that of the "Ice Witch" or the "Frozen Hand." Here the Viking Harold is less wrecked by temptation than by circumstance; but the result of the enthralment is the same. The ice of the Pole closes around him with the same fatality as the waters of the Rhine around his brother and prototype. Surrounded by the white arms of Hecla in her palace of ice, he ceases to lament the bride who is awaiting him in the far South; and he has not even a thought of regret to cast towards his perished companions and the stout ship that once bore him so proudly, her brown ribs now bleaching whitely on the Arctic shore. He too returns, after a long period, but he brings with him the fatal gift of his Northern bride—a hand of ice. He may be strong and brave still, as he was when he went away; but he is no longer the peerless and envied warrior. Men look upon him with a ghostly shudder, and women shrink back from his chilling presence. Not even Freja can thaw away all the ice that has gathered in his veins. He may chastise the robber Ruric from the hills, and sleep once more in the warm embrace of Isoldane; but who knows that at some midnight hour the old curse may not return upon him and the hand he stretches in love and fondness strike death to the hearts that are dearest? Not the same—changed, changed—as is every man who has once yielded to the great temptation of his existence.
All this, which may be purely irrelevant matter, has grown out of a visit paid by some of the characters in this narration, to a fashionable restaurant and saloon on Broadway, and the belief that in some of those houses temptation is lurking in so insidious and deadly a form that they are doing a thousand times the injury inflicted by the acknowledged haunts of vice. Special allusion may or may not be made to the gorgeous but tawdry room in which the three sat down to discuss theira la modebeef, coffee and biscuits. Any one of the fashionable houses to which ladies habitually resort without male protection, for a noonday lunch when shopping,—may serve as a type of all the rest; and not one of them but may be passed with a shudder, by husbands who wish their wives to remain like Cesar's, not only chaste but above suspicion,—and by fathers who do not desire the peach-bloom too early rubbed off from the innocence of their fair daughters.
At this marble table, where the cloth is being so carefully spread by the white-napkined waiter who has a steaming cluster of dishes on a salver on the table opposite,—there may be a little party, like that of our three friends, dropped in on the most proper of errands—that of merely procuring a bit of lunch in the midst of a day of business, without going home for it or visiting the table d'hote at a hotel; but at the next table and the next there is something different. Here sit a party of three giddy girls, without male protection, innocent enough in their lives and intentions, but boldly exposing their faces to the rude gaze of any of the libertine diners-out who may happen to be at the tables opposite, and returning that gaze, when met, with a smile and a simper that merely means scorn and self-confidence but may be easily construed into a less creditable expression. And at this table, only two removed, discussing apate de foix graswhich may or may not have come from Strasburg of the Big Goose Livers, and washing down his edibles with a glass of liqueur that fires the blood like so much molten lava,—sits a boldfaced man, fashionable in dress and perfumed in hair and whiskers, whose gaze is that of the evil eye upon the reputation of any woman, and who has no better occupation than lounging in any place of public resort, to spy out the beauties of female face and figure and the weaknesses in the fortifications that surround female virtue. And here—at one of the opposite row of tables, her cup of coffee and plate of French trifles in pasty just being set down before her—here is a sadder spectacle than either. The wife of a wealthy merchant, yet young, beautiful and attractive, but with a frightened look in her dark eye and a nervous glancing round at the door every time it opens, which too well reveals her story to the close observer. She is waiting for herlover—harsh word in that connection, but the true and only one; her lover, whose acquaintance she may have made through unforbidden glances in this very room, and whom she has permitted to approach her, slowly but surely, as the serpent stole upon Eve in Eden, until she has fallen completely into his power, losing honor, self-respect, everything that a true wife most values, and probably supporting the wretch in a course of gambling and dissipation, with money wrung on one pitiable pretext or other from the grudging hand of her betrayed husband.
It is enough!—let the curtain fall. But oh, heart of man, put up the prayer that other and holier lips once uttered: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil!" And may not thehousesindeed come into judgment?
We have no concern whatever with the pleasant small-talk which floated over the little table at Taylor's, from the lips of Tom Leslie and his two female companions; nor is there any need to pause at this juncture and remark whether the strange glance of Josephine Harris on being introduced to the young man on the street, was repeated or returned. The trio seemed to be a very happy one, Miss Bell Crawford a little starched at first towards a man who had been flung into her way so ambiguously, but rattle-pated Joe firing off occasional fusillades of odd sayings, and Tom, the prince ofpreux chevaliers, falling into the position of an old acquaintance with marvellous rapidity. Their lunch was nearly over, when the mischievous face of Joe, who had been making running comments upon some of the people on the other side of the room, good-naturedly wicked if not complimentary—lit up with a conceit which set her hazel-gray eyes laughing away down to the depths of her brain. At the same moment the quick eyes of Bell Crawford saw that the hand of the merry girl was rummaging in her pocket, andherface became anxious. Before the latter could speak, however, the hand of Joe came out with the treasure she had been seeking—a torn half column, or less, of theHerald. The moment Miss Crawford saw the slip, her anxiety seemed to be redoubled, and she reached over to Joe, as if to take the paper, with the words, half-pleading, half-pettish:
"Don't, Joe—pray don't!"
"Oh, but I must!" said the mischievous girl, taking care that her companion should not reach the slip. "I cannot think of throwing away such an excellent opportunity. I say, Mr. Leslie, you are not an unscrupulous destroyer of female innocence—one of those dreadful fellows we read about in the books, are you?"