The Residence of the Brands—Robert Brand and Dr. Philip Pomeroy—Radical and Copperhead—A passage-at-arms that ended in a Quarrel—Elspeth Graeme the Housekeeper—The Shadow of Shame—Father and Daughter—The Falling of a Parent's Curse.
The Residence of the Brands—Robert Brand and Dr. Philip Pomeroy—Radical and Copperhead—A passage-at-arms that ended in a Quarrel—Elspeth Graeme the Housekeeper—The Shadow of Shame—Father and Daughter—The Falling of a Parent's Curse.
Half a mile northward from the Market street road which has already been before so many times alluded to—on the north side of that road and at the distance of a mile westward from the Hayley residence, was located that before mentioned as the abode of the Brands. It was a fine old house, built fifty or sixty years before, but within a few years repaired and rebuilt with a lavish disregard of cost, a railed promenade having been added at the apex of the steep roof, the whole two stories of height re-enclosed, the windows and doors comparatively modernized, the piazzas remodelled and widened, and all done that the carpenter's art could well be expected to achieve, to add to the comfort and durability of the mansion without destroying the appearance of respectable age which it had already put on. The house stood facing southward upon nearly level ground, the lawn in front of good depth and thickly dotted with forest and other shade trees that had evidently known all the years of the building; while from the eastern side a narrow lane ran down to the road and afforded ingress and egress to carriages passing back towards the handsomely-grouped range of outbuildings in the rear. Adjoining this lane and behind the house was a large garden, with grape trellises and many of the appliances of luxury in horticulture.
At the eastern end of the piazza a broad single door opened into the somewhat antiquated hall; and from that hall a door opened into a parlor fitted up with every appliance of conveniencethat could be needed in such a country residence. Behind that parlor another door opened into a smaller apartment correspondingly fitted but with more of those belongings calculated to show its constant occupancy; and from that rear room still another door opening to the left disclosed a bed-room of comfortable appearance and tasteful arrangement. On the other side of the hall the dining and domestic apartments stretched away, while the spacious upper story supplied rooms to other members of the family.
It was very evident, at a glance, that wealth presided over the modernized old house, and that good taste was not forgotten; and yet an impression could not well be avoided that there must be something of severity, and repugnance to ornament, conjoined with the wealth. Poverty, or even struggling pride, would not have afforded so much of the best: warm taste and lavish liberality would have supplied something more of the costly and the luxurious.
In the second of the rooms mentioned—that immediately in the rear of the parlor, two persons were in conversation at about noon of the same day of the occurrences previously recorded. The one, sitting in an easy-chair with his right leg raised and resting upon another chair crowned with a pillow,—was apparently sixty-five to seventy years of age; tall, if his proportions could properly be judged as he sat, with a figure that must have been robust in its time; the hair so nearly white as to preclude any idea of the color which it might have worn in earlier days; the face well cut and even handsome for its age, though with a shade of severity in the firm nose and shaven lips, which under some circumstances might grow threatening; but any accurate judgment of his character rendered difficult, by the look of pain stamped upon his face by evident bodily suffering. Resting against a small table partially covered with bandages and embrocations, was a stout cane, indicating both that the invalid was in the habit of using a support of that character, and that he could not, even now, be entirely confined to his chair. Such was RobertBrand, owner of the mansion into which we have been introduced, and father of two children apparently as little alike in nature as in sex—Carlton and Elsie Brand.
The second figure was quite as well deserving of notice as the old man in his easy-chair. Doctor Philip Pomeroy, who was at that moment pacing up and down the room without any apparent cause for that violent exercise in warm weather, was a man in whom the acute physiognomist might have found something illustrated by that seemingly listless motion—something possessed in common by restless men, in the superior animal kingdom, and those bears and hyenas which seem to traverse a great many unnecessary miles in travelling up and down the bars of their cages, in the inferior. And yet the doctor could not have been called, with any propriety, an "animal-looking man"—it was the motion which supplied the comparison. He was apparently forty-five to fifty, tall and slight figured, with face clean shaven except a heavy dark moustache, features a little aquiline and decidedly sharp lips that suggested an occasional sneer and a word cutting like a scimetar, eyes of keen scintillant dark brown or black, and rather long dark straight hair through which the threads of silver began to show more as an ornament than a disadvantage. A very fine looking man—a man of undoubted power and will—a man who had evidently enjoyed the most favorable associations; and yet how nearly a man to be either braved or trusted without reserve, it might have needed Lavater's self to decide on a brief acquaintance. That same Lavater, if acquainted with the peculiarities of road turn-outs, would have decided one point, at least, from the vehicle that stood in the lane, near the door—no clumsy and cumbersome gig, weighing an indefinite number of tons and set down as the proper conveyance for doctors from the day when the first one grew too lazy to walk,—but a light, sporting-looking buggy, seated for one, and suggesting fast driving quite as much as the high-blooded, thorough-bred bay that champedhis bit before it and stamped impatiently for the coming of his master.
From the medical character of the visitor and the disabled appearance of the man in the easy-chair, it might have been concluded that the call was a professional one; and such was indeed the fact. An injury to the right limb of Robert Brand, received many years before, had a habit of asserting itself at uncertain periods, crippling him materially all the while, and at those particular times throwing him into all those agonies indifferently known as the pangs of neuralgia and inflammatory rheumatism. At such periods, the traditional character of the "gouty old Admiral" of the English stage, always limping and thumping a heavy cane, and nearly always venting words more forcible than polite, was very nearly illustrated in the old gentleman, his desire for active motion being generally in an inverse ratio to the power of movement. Dr. Pomeroy, one of the most skilful of the physicians of the section, and a man in very extensive practice, was always his medical adviser at such times, and re-directed the application of those warm flannels and neutralizing embrocations which constituted all that even science could do for the alleviation of his sufferings, and about which old Elspeth the housekeeper knew a good deal more, all the while, than any physician could possibly do. For the three days previous, Robert Brand had been suffering to a most painful degree, and this was the third of the daily visits of the doctor.
But whatever might have been the professional character of the visit, it had, before the moment when our attention is called to the two interlocutors, lost any feature which could have marked it as such. Robert Brand was a patriot, almost equally warm-hearted and hot-headed in the type of his attachment to his country; while Dr. Pomeroy was one of those quasi-loyalists, popularly called "Copperheads," who have the love of country quite as often on their lips as the most unshrinking war-advocate can do, but who prefer toshow that love by objecting to every effort made for the preservation of nationality, by denouncing, in every nine words out of ten, something done by the loyal government, while only the poor tenth is kept for a wail over the unfortunate character of the "civil war,"—and by undervaluing every success won by the Union arms, while every momentary advantage gained by the rebels is correspondingly magnified. He seemed to take particular delight, always, in tormenting the old gentleman just to the verge of a positive rupture without quite causing one; and just now, in the advance of the rebel forces into Pennsylvania, he found a golden opportunity.
"Bah!" he said, in response to a strongly patriotic expression of his patron, which had led him to bring down one of his hands upon the disabled leg with a force causing a new tingle in that limb and a new expression of agony upon his face—"bah! All you hot-headed people, young and old, use just such language, all the while. It amounts to nothing, except that perhaps it eases your minds. Saying that 'the Union must and shall be preserved,' and prophesying all kinds of good things for the nation, amount to but very little while a set of incapables sit filling their pockets at Washington (more than half of them traitors, in my opinion), while the army is worse mismanaged than it could be if a set of school-boys led it, and while the enemies you affect to despise are really winning every thing and overrunning the whole country."
"Out upon you, Dr. Pomeroy!" cried the old man, angrily. "You dare to call yourself a patriot, and talk in that manner! There are plenty of fools at Washington, but I would rather see fools there than traitors! If you are not a perfect block-head, you know that the rebels have lost twice as much as they have gained, within the past year, and that if the fight goes on in the same manner for one year more, the miserable mongrel concern will die of its own weakness! But you do notwantit to die—that is just what ailsyou!—you wouldrather see Jeff Davis in the Capitol than any loyal man who would not give all the offices to your miserable broken-down party!"
"And you would rather see the whole country lying in ruins, with heaps of dead everywhere and the few who remain starving to death in the midst of them, than that the country should be in any other hands than those of your friends who do nothing else than talk about the nigger, legislate for the nigger, and fight for the nigger!" answered the doctor, still continuing his walk, and his face showing decided temper.
"It is false, and you know it, Philip Pomeroy!" said the invalid, with a motion of his hand towards the big cane, which indicated that he would have liked to use it by breaking it over the doctor's head.
"It is true, andyouknow it, Robert Brand!" replied the doctor, whose temper seemed to return to its equanimity the moment he had succeeded in throwing his patient into a sufficient rage. "But you need not take so much pains to conceal your opinions, old gentleman!Idon't! If the country is to lie under the control of men who only legislate and fight for the nigger, who trample upon the Constitution and fill Fort McHenry and Fort Lafayette and Fort Warren with better men than themselves, who do not happen to think and act precisely astheydo,—why, the sooner that Jeff Davis, or any one else, gets possession, the better for all concerned."
"Doctor Pomeroy, you ought to be taken and hung, with the other traitors, and I shouldn't much mind having a pull at the rope!" broke out the old man, now almost entirely beside himself with indignation.
"Oh, I know that!" answered the doctor, whose temper was still visibly improving as that of his patient grew worse. "Any of your abolition pack would have helped to hang every democrat, long ago, if they had onlydared! The only trouble is that they did not do it while they had the opportunity.Now it is too late. You daren't open the doors of your State-prisons any more, unless it is to let somebodyout! And before many days some of you will sing a different tune—take my word for it. Some of you radicals, even here at Philadelphia, will try to make the Confederate leaders believe that you have been the truest friends of the South, all the while."
"What do you mean, you scoundrel?" asked the old gentleman, whose harsh words to a man somewhat younger than himself appeared to be fully understood and not taken in quite the sense which they might have borne to other ears.
"I mean that Lee will take Harrisburgh, and that next he will take Philadelphia; then—"
"Take Purgatory! He can never take Harrisburgh, let alone Philadelphia!"
"He can and will take it! What is to hinder him?"
"Just what has hindered his taking Washington, any time the last two years—better troops than his own, and more of them."
"Sheep before butchers'-dogs! The men of the North have never gone into the war at all, and they never will go. That scum which you call an army cannot fight the earnest and determined men of the South, and you ought to know it. Within a week Lee will be in Philadelphia, and then we will see about the change of tune!"
"Within a week, if he dares advance, he will be eaten up by the State militia alone, even if the Army of the Potomac does not save them the trouble!" said the old man.
"The Army of the Potomac has been good for nothing ever since Hooker blundered its last opportunity away at Chancellorsville!" retorted the physician. "The army has no confidence inhim, and the country has no confidence either in him or the army. The State militia will vigorously stay at home, or they will behave so badly after they go out, that they had much better kept where nobody saw them! Oh, by the way!—" and the face of the doctor lit up with a newexpression. A sneer settled itself upon his well-formed lips, and there came into his scintillant eyes a gleam of deadly dislike which boded no good to the subject of which he was about to speak. He might have been only half in earnest, before, while driving the old man wild with his Copperhead banter; but he was certainly interested in what he was about to say, now!
"Well?" asked the patient, querulously, as he saw that some new topic was to interlard that which had already been so unpleasant.
"That State militia you were talking about," said the doctor. "Your son was expected to take up his old commission and go out with one of the regiments, was he not?"
"He was not only expected to do so, but he has done so!" answered the father, with love and pride in his eyes. "Not all the people in the country are either Copperheads or cowards, doctor; and I am proud to tell you that ifIam too old and too much crippled to take part in the battles of my country, or even to get up and break my cane over your head when you insult the very name of patriotism,—I have a son who when his opportunity comes can do the one and will do the other!"
"When his 'opportunity' comes!" echoed the doctor, sneeringly.
"Yes, his opportunity!" re-echoed the father, who felt that there was something invidious in the tone, though he could not read that face which might have given him a better clue to the character of the man with whom he was dealing. "My son has been too much hampered with business before, to accept any of the chances which have been offered him; but now that his native State is invaded, business is thrown by and you will find him, sir, keeping up the honor of the name."
"Humph!" said the doctor, pausing in his walk and for some unexplainable reason going to the window and lookingout; so that he stood with his back to the old gentleman. "Where is your son, now?"
"Where? Gone down to the rendezvous to take his commission, of course, as I understand that the troops will leave to-night."
"Humph!" once more said the doctor, in the same insolent tone and retaining his position at the window. "And yet I happen to know that your son has discovered some new 'business,' (with a terribly significant emphasis on the last word) and that he is not going one step with the regiment."
"Dr. Pomeroy, I know better!" was the reply.
"Mr. Brand, I know what I am talking about, a good deal better than you imagine!" sneered the doctor, who having by that time managed to get his face into that shape which he had no objection to being seen by his patient, now turned about and faced him, with his hands under the tails of his coat.
"Whatdo you know?" was the inquiry, a little trouble blending with the anxiety in the face.
"Well, I will tell you, as perhaps you may as well learn the fact from me as from any one else," answered the doctor, his tones now very smooth, and his manner almost deferential, as should be the demeanor of any man towards his victim at the moment of stabbing him under the fifth rib. "I had occasion to call at the armory of the Reserves, an hour or two ago, to set the broken arm of one of the fellows who had taken too much Monongahela in anticipation of his start, and fallen down-stairs. I learned there and then, with some surprise and not a little grief (the father ought to have caught the expression of his face at that moment, and thereby measured the "grief" indicated!) that Mr. Carlton Brand had been down at the armory, alleged hisbusinessto be such that he could not possibly leave the city, and declined any further connection whatever with the regiment."
"It is impossible!" said the father.
"It is true, however, like a good many impossible things!" again sneered the physician. "And I have been thinking whether some others of members of the State militia would not be found like your amiable son—toobusyto pay any attention to the defence of the State!"
"Dr. Pomeroy!" said the father, after one moment of almost stupefied silence. "Dr. Pomeroy, you have not been friends with my son for a long time, and I know it, though I do not know what could have caused any disagreement. But I do not suppose you would deliberately tell a falsehood about him that could be detected in half an hour; and I want to know what there is hidden in your words, more than you have chosen to convey."
"You had better ask your son when he comes!" was the reply.
"No—I askyou, now, and I think you had better answer me!" said the old man.
"Well, then," answered the doctor, "if you insist upon it, my love for the young man is not so warm as to give me a great deal of pain in the telling, and you may know all you wish. Your son has been doubted a little, ever since the breaking out of the war, from his repeated refusals of positions in the army; and—"
"The man who says that my son is disloyal, lies!" cried the old man, interrupting him. "You, or any other man!"
"It was not on the ground of hisdisloyaltythat he was suspected!" sneered the doctor.
"And what ground then?" asked the father, his face and his whole manner showing something terrible within that could be only partially suppressed.
"The ground of hiscowardice, since you will have it!" spoke the doctor, in such a tone of fiendish exultation as Mephistopheles may have used to Faust, at the moment of assuring him that the last hope of happiness on earth or pardon from heaven had been swept away in the slaughter of Valentine and the moral murder of Marguerite. "There is not anofficer in the Reserves, who heard him refuse to join the regiment this morning, but believes him—yes,knowshim, to be an arrant poltroon."
"Doctor Philip Pomeroy, you are a liar as well as a traitor and a scoundrel! If I had two legs, and still was, as I am, old enough to be your father, you would not leave this house without broken bones! Get out of it, send me your bill to-morrow, or even to-day, and never let me see you set foot in it again while I live!"
The face of the old man was fearful, at that juncture. In spite of the pain of his disabled limb, he had grasped his cane and struggled to a standing position, before concluding his violent words; and as he concluded, passion overcame all prudence, and the heavy cane went by the doctor's head, crashing through the window and taking its way out into the garden, at the same moment when his limb gave way and he sunk back into his chair with a groan that was almost a shriek, clutching at the bell-rope that hung near him and nearly tearing it from its fastenings.
Dr. Pomeroy said not another word, whatever he might have felt. He had dodged the flying cane, by not more than an inch, and such chances are not likely to improve the temper of even the most amiable. For one instant there was something in his face that might have threatened personal revenge of the violence as well as the unpardonable words, in spite of the difference of age: then the sneer crept over his face again, he stepped out through the parlor into the hall, took his hat, and the next moment was bowling down the lane into the road, behind his fast-trotting bay. It seemed likely that his last professional visit to the Brands had been paid, even if it had not yet been paid for!
The terrible appeal of the master of the house to the bell-rope at his hand was answered the moment after by the appearance of a woman of so remarkable an aspect as to be worthy of quite as much attention as either of the personages who have before been called, in the same room, to thereader's attention. Her dress was that of a housekeeper or upper servant, though the height of her carriage and the erectness of her figure might have stamped her as an empress. And in truth that figure did not need any such extraordinary carriage to develop it, for, as compared with the ordinary stature of woman, it was little else than gigantic. The man who built a door for Elspeth Graeme, less than six feet in the clear, subjected her to imminent danger of bringing up with a "bump" every time she entered it; and her broad, square, bony figure showed that all the power of her frame had not been frittered away in length. Her hands were large and masculine, though by no means ill-shaped, and her foot had not only the tread supposed to belong to that of the coarser sex, but very nearly its size. In face she was broad yet still longer of feature, with hair that had been light brown before the gray sifted itself so thickly among it as to render the color doubtful,—with eyes of bluish gray, a strong and somewhat coarse mouth with no contemptible approach to a moustache of light hairs bristling at the corners,—and with complexion wrinkled and browned by the exposures of at least sixty years, until very nearly the last trace of what had once been youth and womanhood was worn away and forgotten. Yet there was something very good and very kindly amid the rugged strength of the face; and while little children might at the first glance have feared the old woman and run away from her as a "witch," they would at the second certainly have crept back to her knees and depended upon a protection which they were certain to receive.
It is only necessary, to say, in addition, that she was Scottish by birth as well as by blood and name—that she had come to this country nearly forty years before, when Robert Brand was a young man, and attached herself to the fortunes of the family because they were Scottish by blood and she was the very incarnation of faithful feudality—that his daughter had been named Elspeth (since softened to Elsie) at her earnest desire, because she said the name was "the bonniestava" and she had herself been named after a noble lady who bore it, in her own land, and who had done much to give her that upright carriage by standing as her god-mother—and that for many a long year, now, she had been the working head of the Brand household, scarcely more so since the death of its weak, hysterical mistress, a dozen years before, than while she was alive and pretending to a management which she never understood.
If any one person beneath that roof, more legitimately than another, belonged to the family and felt herself so belonging, that person was Elspeth Graeme; and if something of the romantic, which the stern sense of the father would have been slow to approve, had grown up in both his children, it was to the partial love of Elspeth and her stories of Scottish romance, poetry, history, song and superstition, carrying them away from prosaic America to the wimpling burns and haunted glens of the land from which their blood had been derived,—that such a feeling, fortunate or unfortunate as the future might prove, was principally to be credited.
"Did you ring, sir? Ech, Lord, the mon's deein'!" were the two very different exclamations made by Elspeth as she entered the room, after the departure of the doctor, and caught sight of the situation in which the master seemed to be lying.
"No, Elspeth, I am not 'deein' as you call it," he growled out, when the pain of his exertion had again somewhat subsided and he could find breath for words. "But I wish I was! Is that cursed doctor gone?"
"He was gettin' to his carriage the minute, and he's awa by this," answered the housekeeper. "But what ava has he been doin' to ye? Murderin' ye maybe!—they're a dolefu' uncanny set, the doctors!"
"If you ever see that man here again, and you don't have him shot or set the dog on him, out of the house you go, neck and crop, the whole pack of you—do you hear!" was the reply to Elspeth's comment on the medical profession.
"Just as ye say, master," said Elspeth. "I'll set Carlo at him myself, if ye say so; and wo but the brute will just worry him, for he does na like him and is unco fond of snappin' aboot his heels!"
"Where is Elsie?" was the next question.
"Gone over to Mistress Hayley's the mornin'. Can I do any thing for your leg, sir?—for the wench in the kitchen's clean daft, and I'll be wanted there, maybe."
"No—you can do nothing. My leg is better. But send Elsie to me the moment she comes in."
"Hark!" said the housekeeper, as a light foot sounded on the piazza and came in through the hall. "There's the lassie hersel—I ken her step among a thousand. I'll just send her in to you the moment she has thrawn aff her bonnet." And the old woman departed on her errand.
There must have been an acuteness beyond nature, in the ears of old Elspeth, if she indeed knew the tread of the young girl; for her step, as she entered the room, was so slow, laggard and lifeless, so unlike the usual springing rapidity of her girlish nature, that even her lover might have been pardoned for failing to recognize it. It was as if some crushing weight fettered her limbs and bowed down her brow. And a crushing weight indeed rested upon her—the first unendurable grief of her young life—the knowledge of her only brother's shame. Robert Brand marked the slow step and saw the downcast head; and little as he could possibly know of the connection of that demeanor with the subject of his previous thought, it was not of that cheerful and reassuring character calculated to restore the lost equanimity of a man insulted in the tenderest point of his honor and chafed beyond human endurance. His first words were rough and peremptory:
"Why do you move in that manner, girl, when you come to seeme? I do not like it—do not let me see any more of it!"
"I was coming, father!" was poor Elsie's only answer.
"So I see—at the rate of ten feet an hour! What is the matter with you?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?—do not tell me that, girl! I know better, or you would never carry that gloomy face and move as if you were going to your grandmother's funeral!"
"Indeed there is nothing the matter with me, father; but there soon will be, if you scold me!" and the young girl, making a terrible effort to be cheerful, came up to his side, put her arm around his neck and pressed her lips to his forehead with a movement so pure and fond that it might have softened Nero at the moment of ordering his last wholesale murder. It partially disarmed the pained and querulous father. He put his arm around the daughter's waist, returned the pressure and seemed to be soothed for a moment by resting his head against the bosom that pressed close to him. But the demon that had been roused could only sleep thus temporarily. Directly he put her away, though not roughly, looked her full in the face, and asked:
"Where is your brother?"
"You know he went down to town this morning, and he has not yet come home," was the reply, with an effort not by any means a successful one, to keep the voice from quavering. The practised ear of the father detected the difference between that intonation and the usual unembarrassed utterance of his daughter; and he naturally connected it at once with the restraint of her manner, and noticed an evasion in her answer that might otherwise have escaped him.
"I know he has not come home," he said. "But that was not my question. You have been at Mrs. Hayley's where he spends quite as much of his time as here. Have you seen him?"
Elsie Brand would have given the proudest feature of her personal adornment, at that moment, to be able to lie! She saw that some undefined anxiety with reference to her brother must have moved her father's repeated questions,and naturally she feared the worst—that Carlton's mad words had indeed been overheard, and that even in that brief space of time some messenger of evil had travelled fast and betrayed the fatal secret. If so, the storm was about to burst on the devoted head of her brother, not the less deadly because she must bear the first brunt of its violence. Yes—Elsie Brand would almost have given her right hand to be able to lie at that moment. But her education had been as true as was her nature, and she managed to falter out, yet more suspiciously:
"Yes, father!"
"And youdaredto trifle with me, girl, when I asked you a plain question?" and Robert Brand grasped his daughter by the arm so forcibly that she nearly screamed with the violent pressure, and tears did indeed start to her eyes as she sobbed out—
"I did not mean to trifle with you, father. I only thought—"
"You thought that when I asked one question, I meant another, did you?" and the face that looked upon her was set, hard and very stern. "You had better not try the experiment again, if you do not wish to suffer for it!"
"Oh, father!" and the young girl, enough broken before, now wept outright. But he stopped her, very roughly.
"No bawling! not a whimper! Now listen to me. You have seen your brother since morning—since he went down to the rendezvous."
"Yes, father."
"You saw him at Mrs. Hayley's."
"Yes, father."
"And he came there to bid Margaret good-bye, before he went away, and you are such a miserable whining school-girl that you are making all this fuss about his absence. Is that the fact? Speak!" He still held her arm, though his grasp was less painful than it had been at first; and his eyes looked upon her with such a steady, anxious, almost fearfulgaze, that it would have driven away the second temptation to falsehood, even had such a temptation once obtained power. There was nothing for it, at that moment, but to speak the truth so far as compelled.
"No, father. Carlton is not going away." The last three words were uttered so low, and so tangled up among the sobs that she had not been able entirely to check, that they might not have been distinguishable except to the preternaturally acute ear of the suspicious father.
"He is not going? Why?" The first words were harsh and loud—the last one was almost thunder, easily heard, if any one was listening, over the whole house. Before it the young girl shook like an aspen and broke out into fresh sobs as she attempted to answer.
"Because—because his business will not allow—"
"Because he isa coward!Answer me that question, girl, or never speak to me again while you live!" Robert Brand had apparently forgotten all his pain and risen from his chair, still holding his daughter's arm, as he hurled out the interrogation and the threat. Poor Elsie saw that he knew all, too surely; further dissembling was useless; and she dropped upon her knees, that iron grasp still upon her arm, lifted up both her hands, and piteously moaned—
"Yes, that is the reason! Oh, how did you hear it? Killme, father, if you will, but do not kill poor Carlton! He cannot help it—indeed he cannot!"
They were fearful words that immediately thereafter fell from the lips of Robert Brand—words that no provocation should ever tempt a father to utter, but words which have been plentifully showered on the heads of the shamed or the disobedient, by the thoughtless or the unmerciful, who arrogated to themselves God's power of judgment and retribution, through all the long ages.
"Get up, girl, if you do not wish me to forget that you are not yourself the miserable hound for whom you are pleading!"
"Oh, father!" broke again from the lips of the frightened girl, who did not move from her kneeling position.
"Get up, I say, or I will strike you with this cane as I would a dog!"
Elsie Brand staggered to her feet, she knew not how, but stood bowed before the stern judge in an attitude of pleading quite as humble and pitiful as that of prayer. The next words that fell upon her ears were not addressed to her, but seemed to be spoken for others' hearing than those who dwell in tenements of clay, while the voice that uttered them trembled in mingled grief and indignation, and the disabled frame shook as if it had been racked with palsy.
"Myson a coward! a miserable poltroon to be pointed at, spat upon, and whipped!Myblood made a shame in the land, by the one whom I trusted to honor it! God's blackest and deepest curse—"
"Oh, father! father!" broke in the young girl in a very wail of agony so pitiful that it must have moved any heart not calloused for the moment against all natural feeling, but that availed nothing to stop the impending curse or even to lower the voice that uttered it.
"—God's deepest and blackest curse 'light upon the coward! shame, sorrow, and quick death! He shall have neither house, home nor family from this moment! I disown this bastard of my blood! I devote him to ruin and to perdition!"
Few men have ever uttered, over the most criminal and degraded of the offspring of their own loins, so dire an imprecation; and no father, who has ever uttered one approaching it in horrible earnest, but is doomed here or hereafter to feel the bitterest weight of that curse resting upon his own head. Lear was clean distraught by wrongs beyond human endurance, before he called upon "all the stored vengeances of heaven" to fall on the "ingrateful top" of Goneril, and threatened both his unnatural daughters with "such revenges" that they should be the "terrors of the earth"; andonly that incipient madness clears him from the sin and leaves him human to demand our after pity. There can be no excuse for such paroxysms of remorseless anger—it is difficult to supply even a palliation. And yet there was something in the blood, in the past life and associations of Robert Brand, coming as near to offering excuse for shame and indignation driving to temporary madness, as could well have been offered in behalf of any man of his day, committing a sin of such nature. And to circumstances embodying these it is now necessary to revert, even at the expense of a temporary pause in the directness of this narration.
The Birth and Blood of the Brands—Pride that came down from the Crusades—Robert Brand as Soldier and Pension-Agent—The Pensioners of the Revolution—How Elsie raved, and how the Father's Curse seemed To Be Answered—Dr. James Holton, and the loss of a Corpus Delicti.
The Birth and Blood of the Brands—Pride that came down from the Crusades—Robert Brand as Soldier and Pension-Agent—The Pensioners of the Revolution—How Elsie raved, and how the Father's Curse seemed To Be Answered—Dr. James Holton, and the loss of a Corpus Delicti.
It has already been indicated, in speaking of the ties which bound Elspeth Graeme to the Brand family, that they were Scots by descent as she was by both blood and birth. Robert Brand himself stood in the fourth remove from Gaelic nativity, without the spirit of his race being extinct or even modified. When Archibald Alexander, father of that William Alexander who claimed to be Earl of Stirling in the peerage of Scotland while he was gallantly fighting as a Major-General in the patriot army of the Revolution, came to America in 1740, he was accompanied by a man who claimed to hold quite as good blood as himself, though he served in little less than a menial capacity to the heir of the attainted house ofStirling. This was Malcolm Brand, of Perthshire, a member of the Scottish and elder branch of the Brands of Hertfordshire in England, who at a later day carried the two crossed swords which they had borne on their shields since the Crusades, to augment the threatening bulls, wolves and leopards of the Dacres, in the possession of that barony. It was in a victorious hand-to-hand fight with a gigantic Saracen on the field of Askalon, that Gawin de Brande, laird of Westenro in Lothian, fighting close beside King Richard, won that proud quartering of arms; and it is to be believed that no descendant of his blood, either in 1740 or in 1863, had quite forgotten that exploit or the fact that the very name of the family was only another antique appellation for the sword.
Malcolm Brand, the emigrant, was the father of a son Robert, born in New Jersey, as Archibald Alexander was the sire of William, who so proudly outdid the exploits of his elder blood, fighting under the leadership of Washington. The two young men, resident nearly together among the New Jersey hills, entered the army at the same time, and while the one rose to the dignity of a Major-General, the other shared in his combats at Long Island, Germantown and Monmouth, always fighting gallantly, but never rising beyond the grade of a first-lieutenant, and dying at last a prisoner on one of the pest-ships of the Wallabout. His son William, named after Lord Stirling and born in 1768, had of course passed as a boy through the trying period of the great contest, known that identification with the patriot cause inevitable from anxiety for a father engaged in it and grief over his lingering death by disease and privation for its sake; and it could not be otherwise than that the ears ofhisson, Robert (the man of 1863), should have been filled with relations calculated at once to keep alive the pride of his blood and to identify him with the glory and honor of the land in which his lot had been cast.
Then had come another influence, not less potent—thesecond breaking-out of hostilities against England, in the War of 1812. The blood of the Brands was not cooled—it sprung to arms; and Robert Brand, then a young lawyer, taking the place of his father already invalided, assumed the sword of his armorial bearings and fought with Scott at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane, receiving so terrible an injury in the leg, at the close of the latter battle, that he was to be a tortured cripple from that day forward, but glorying even in the disablement and the suffering, because his injury had not been met in some trivial accident of peaceful life, but sustained where brave men dared their doom.
And yet another influence, not less potent, was still to come. Years after, when Carlton Brand was a child in arms, his father, then a practising lawyer in his native State, became identified with that most romantic and most picturesque body of men, of whom the present age remembers but little, and of whom the age to come will know nothing except as the knowledge is handed down from father to son, or carried forward in such desultory records as these—The Pensioners of the Revolution. At that time, not less on account of his spotless reputation than the crippling wound received in the service, he was appointed Pension Agent for the section in which he resided, and duly commissioned twice a year to receive from the War Department and pay over to the old men the somewhat scant and very tardy pay with which the land of Washington at last smoothed the passage to the grave of those who had been his companions.
It was Robert Brand's privilege, then, to meet those men in the familiar intercourse of business—to listen to their tales, so often slighted by those wiser or less reverent, of foughten field and toilsome march, of cheerless camp and suffering in the wilderness, when this giant nation was a wilful child unjustly scourged by a tyrant mother—to find in each some reminder of his patriot grandfather, and some suggestion of what that grandfather would have been had the fortune of war spared him to go down into old age and senility.
Twice a year, as the pension day came round, one by one they gathered in the little room where the scanty pension was to be doled—each with the measured beat of his stick sounding upon the floor as he entered, regularly as when his foot had beaten time in the olden days, under the iron rain of Princeton, or on the suffering march to Valley Forge. One by one they gathered to what was their great semi-annual holiday, with the kindly greetings of garrulous and failing age—with the gentle complaint, so patiently uttered, over limbs that seemed to be bowing with the weight of time, and with the pardonable boast that it was not so when the speaker had been young, in such a winter on the Northern Lines, or with such an officer at Yorktown or Saratoga. When the winters—said they—were colder than they are now, when the men were hardier, and when the women (they had all long before gone to rest, in the family graveyard or the little plat beside the church,) were fairer far than their daughters ever grew!
Harmless deception of age!—pleasant coloring that distance gives in time as well as in the material world, so that the forms we once loved may be even more beautiful in thought than they were in reality; the grassy lawns upon which we played in childhood, greener far in memory than they ever were beneath the sun of June; and even those hours once filled with anxiety and vexation, so beguiled out of their uncomely features, that they have no power to harm us in after-thought, and almost seem to have been freighted with unalloyed happiness! There may have been a thunder-cloud rising in the heavens, that afternoon when we went boating with Harry and Tom and Mary and Susan and Alice, all the way down from Lovers' Bend to the Isle of Kisses, with music, and laughter and loving words that were sweeter far than song; and the thunder-cloud may have thickened and gathered, so that the young lovers were drenched and very dismal-looking, long before their return at evening; but be sure that forty years after, when the day is remembered, only the sunshine, the smiling faces and the flashing water is seen,and if the thunder-storm has a place in memory at all, it comes back more as a pleasure than a disappointment. Mary may have had a cloud upon her brow, that evening at the garden-gate, from the absence of a ribbon lightly promised, or the presence of a recollection how some one flirted with Julia on the evening before; and there may even have been a tiff verging far towards a lover's quarrel, before the reconciliation and the parting under the moon; but when the hair has grown gray, and Mary is with the millions sleeping in the breast of our common mother, only the moonlight, that dear last kiss, and the rapture of happy love are remembered, and that checkered hour is looked back upon as one of unmixed enjoyment. Time is the flatterer of memory, as well as the consoler of grief, and perhaps has no holier office. So it was well that the old men's mental eyes were dim when their physical vision was failing; and when we grow old as they, if the scythe of the destroyer cut us not away long before, may the far-away past be gilded for us as it was for them, by the rosy hue of fading remembrance, until all the asperities, the hard realities, the sharp and salient edges and angles of life, are smoothed and worn away forever!
Sitting side by side, they talked—those bent and worn and gray old men—of scenes long matters of honored history, glorying (ah! honest and natural glory!) in having stood guard at the tent of Wayne, or shared the coarse fare of Sumter in the Southern woods, but most of all if happily the eye of Washington had chanced to beam upon them, and his lips (those lips that seldom broadly smiled) approved or thanked their honest service. Few men, even of those who fought beside him, seemed ever to have known a smile from the Father of his Country; but for those few there always beamed a light of glorious memory to which the all-repaying word and the intoxicating smile of the Great Corsican would have been empty and valueless.
It was easy, twenty or thirty years afterwards, to remember the fire that blazed in the dim eyes of old Job Marston, ashe told how Washington commended him for his good conduct on the afternoon of the dreadful day of Long Island, when Sullivan's legion broke and fled like frightened sheep,—and how the veteran straightened himself upon his staff as if the head which had once borne the praise of the Joshua of American Liberty should scarcely bend even to time. Or the quivering of the hand of Walter Thorne, one of the men who bore, through every trial and danger, the pledge of faith of the Monmouth League—quivering yet with the anger which had brooded for more than fifty years,—as he pictured so plainly the burning of his father's house by the Refugees, the acres of broad land laid waste by them, the cattle driven towards the royal lines from his own homestead, the arming of his friends, the chase, the recapture, and the ghastly figure of the Refugee captain as they hung him on a spreading limb that spanned the road, a sacrifice not only for the home in ashes but to the manes of Captain Huddy, scarcely yet taken down from his oak-tree gallows on the heights of Navesink. Or the quietly felicitous chuckle with which Stephen Holmes, who had been one of "Captain Huyler's men" in the operations of that patriot marine freebooter around the shores of the lower bay of New York, detailed the success of a night attack in boats pretending to carry live-stock and oysters for sale, by which one vessel of the British fleet lying in the bay was captured, much welcome spoil fell into their hands for the use of needy families at home, and all the remaining vessels of the squadron rode uncomfortably in the bay for a long time after. Or the half playful and half indignant raising of the cane of Robert Grey, when told by his old companions, for the five-hundredth time beyond a doubt, that he was suspected of a share in Arnold's treason, for not stopping the disguised Andre as he passed his sentinel post below West Point, before he fell into the hands of the three very common and insignificant men made immortal by one single act—Williams, Paulding and Van Wert. There would have been no pretence in the motion, spite of his eighty years andfaltering limbs, had the speaker hazarded more than a jest against the faithfulness of the old man's service in the "dark day." But easiest of all was it to remember the story of Thomas West, wounded, and crippled from that day forth, in assisting to bear the wounded Lafayette from the field of Brandywine, and named a subaltern officer at the close of that memorable action. His was the seat of honor; and his was something more, even, than that measure of respect demanded by all and so cheerfully paid to white hairs and honorable scars.
Seldom was there a voice to speak one word of disrespect or undervaluation in the old men's company; and though the privilege of garrulous and failing age was often taken, and though the story once full of life and interest grew sadly tedious when again and again repeated,—yet there was no pardon, and deserved to be none, for him who forgot that reverence due to the men who bore the last personal recollections of the seven-years war. Only once, within the experience of Robert Brand as a Pension Agent, was such disrespect shown; and then the punishment was so signal that there were no fears of the impropriety being repeated. Mart Tunison, a wealthy young landowner, rudely jostled old Job Marston on one occasion, and when called to account for the offence, snapped his fingers at the veteran as a "cursed old humbug, always in the way and always telling stories of battles he had never seen." "You are rich, they say, Mart Tunison," said the old man, while the younger one could not read the flash that still lived in his faded eye. "Iamrich, and what is that to you, grand-daddy?" was the answer, with a slap of the hand on the jingling pocket. "Yes, you are rich, and most people do not know how you became so!" almost hissed the old man, little knowing how he was pointing a moral for a future day by speaking of the "shoddy" of that by-gone time. "I will tell all your friends, and you, how you got so stuffed up that you can snap your fingers in an old man's face! You are living on the proceeds of themoney that your Tory grandfather, old Tom Tunison, made by stealing cattle, when he was one of the Refugee Cow-Boys, and driving them over the lines to sell to the British, before he ran away to Nova Scotia to save his neck!" Mart Tunison, if he had ever before known the real origin of his wealth, which is doubtful,—would probably have given the best field of all his broad lands to prevent that revelation of the shame of his family, which afterwards followed him like a thing of ill-omen, to the very grave!
There was at that time in the office of Robert Brand, a stripling youngster who promised very little good to the world and has probably as yet disappointed no one—who thought more of play than of work, of music than of mortgages, of Burns than Blackstone, and of a rosy-cheeked girl who came into the office on some little errand to the "'Squire" than of the most proud and stately of his male clients. Among his vices, he had a fancy for jingling verse; and one day when the semi-annual visit of the pensioners had just terminated and he had listened afresh to the same old tales of glory told over again in the same faltering accents that he had heard so many times before, his one virtue of reverence for the aged and the venerable rose into an idle rhyme, which may have a fit place in this connection, and which he called