The Bearer of a Disgraced Name, in England—A Strange Quest and a Strange Unrest—Hurrying over to Ireland—Too Late for the Packet—The little Despatch-steamer—Henry Fitzmaurice, the Journalist—An Unexpected Passage—The Peril of the Emerald, and the end of all Quests save one.
The Bearer of a Disgraced Name, in England—A Strange Quest and a Strange Unrest—Hurrying over to Ireland—Too Late for the Packet—The little Despatch-steamer—Henry Fitzmaurice, the Journalist—An Unexpected Passage—The Peril of the Emerald, and the end of all Quests save one.
Far back in the progress of this narration, when it had only reached half the distance to which it has now arrived, it was said of one of the principal persons therein involved: "Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time, * * * motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events without connection and action without explanation." The same remark will apply with quite as much force, at this stage, to the movements of the bearer of that dishonored name, in his movements on the other side of the Atlantic, which must now be briefly recorded in their due order.
It will be remembered that the American entered his name at Liverpool, on the twentieth day of July, with the placeof his residence attached. Thenceforward enough is known, through hotel and other records, to be sure that he spent some two weeks in London, occupying lodgings at one of the respectable houses of the great metropolis, but spending his time, in other regards, in a manner scarcely to have been expected from any previous knowledge of his life and antecedents. Was it the lawyer,becausethe lawyer, who visited Scotland Yard the very next day after his arrival in London, and spent so much time with some of the leading men in charge of that great police-establishment, that he might have seemed to be employed in studying the whole English system of criminal detection? And was it the lawyer,asthe lawyer and consequently on account of his remembrance of past connection with the ferreting out of crime in his native land, who went immediately afterwards into a continuous and apparently systematic round of visits to the worst haunts of vice in the Modern Babel, becoming, sometimes in disguise and sometimes in his own proper person, but always more or less closely accompanied by some member of the force, the habitue of streets in which burglars and thieves most congregated, and of lanes in which receivers of stolen property, forgers and all disreputable and dangerous characters were known to have their places of business or their dens of hiding?
Or was there, leaving the profession of the lawyer out of the question, something in the peculiar surroundings of this man—something in the relations of character and connection which he had allowed to grow around him, unfitting him for other amusements and researches in a city which he had never before visited, and one supplying such marvellous temptations to the sight-seer and the antiquarian? Or was he paying the penalty of the past in an unrest which left him no peace except he found it in continual motion and in the companionship and the study of those far more outlawed by statute but not more in social position than himself? Strangequestions, again, and questions which cannot be answered, at this time, by any thing more than the mere suggestion.
Certain it is, whatever the motive, that Westminster Abbey, with its every stone sacred to the memory of the great dead, seemed to present no attractions to him, commensurate with those of Seven Dials, sacred to every phase of poverty and villany; that the Houses of Parliament were ignored in favor of St. Giles and Bermondsey, noted for debates of a very different character from those heard before the occupant of the Woolsack and the Speaker of the Commons; and that (this seeming so peculiarly strange in a lawyer of admitted character and power) even the Lord Chancellor, rendering one of those decisions calculated to affect not only the laws of property in England but the whole legal system wherever the English language was spoken, seemed to have far less attention paid to him or his dicta, than was given to some gownless libel on the practice of criminal law, who could point out the habits and haunts of Burly Bill, the noted burglar whom he had lately saved from transportation by proving that he was in three different places at once, and neither of them the spot where the crime was committed,—or Snivelling Sall, reputed to be in the near companionship of the most successful utterer of forged notes who had so far escaped the clutches of the detective birds of prey. Night and day, during all those two weeks, he seemed to eat hastily and to sleep only as if sleep was a secondary necessity of nature, to be thrown overboard whenever some all-absorbing thought should make continual wakefulness necessary.
Then the fancy (might it not be called madness?) seemed to change. He had either exhausted the crime of London or he had skimmed that compound until there was no novelty of rich villainy remaining. Without having examined one work of art or one antiquarian curiosity (so far as could be known), and certainly without having made one effort to find a footing in that society for which education and past associations would so well have fitted him,—he flitted away fromLondon and the name of Carlton Brand was to be found inscribed on the books of one of the leading hotels at Manchester. And what did he there? Precisely what he had been doing in London, it appeared—nothing less and nothing more. Alternately in conversation with one of the detective force or with some one of the wretches whom the detective force was especially commissioned to bring to justice—the Manchester looms (not yetallstopped by the dearth of cotton and the "fratricidal war" in America) presented no more charm to him than had been afforded by the high-toned and rational attractions of the metropolis. At times dressed with what seemed a studied disregard of the graces of person, and scarcely ever so arraying himself that he would have dreamed of presenting himself in such a guise in the midst of any respectable circle at home—two or three days ran him through the criminal life of Manchester. Then away to Birmingham, and there—but why weary with repetition when a succeeding fact can be so well indicated by one that has preceded it? The same unsettled and apparently aimless life—if not aimless, certainly with tendencies the most singular and unaccountable. Thence to Bristol, and from Bristol to Liverpool. From Liverpool, with flying haste the whole length of the island and over the border to Edinburgh, paying no more attention, apparently, to the scenes of Scottish song and story by which he dashed, than might have been necessary to remember the cattle-rievers and free-booters who had long before furnished pattern for his late associates,—and seeing in the old closes and wynds frowned down upon by Calton Hill and the Castle, only retreats in which robbers could take refuge without serious risk of being unearthed. Then, strangely enough, away southward again to Dover, with a passage-ticket for Calais taken but countermanded before use, indicating that Paris had been in view but that some sudden circumstance had made a change in the all-the-while inexplicable calculation. What was all this—the question arises once more—the following out of some clue onwhich the whole welfare of a life was believed to depend, or merely the vague and purposeless pursuit of some melancholy fancy furnishing the very mockery of a clue through that labyrinth which borders the realm of declared madness?
The American had been something more than a month in England, and far away beyond his knowledge all the events before recorded as occurring to Margaret Hayley and her group of society in the White Mountains had already taken place,—when one afternoon, late in August, the train that dashed into Holyhead from Birmingham and Chester, by Anglesey and over the Menai, bore this exemplification of unrest as a passenger. Those who saw him emerge from the carriage upon the platform noticed the haste with which he appeared to step and the eagerness of his inquiry whether the train, which had been slightly delayed by an accident, was yet in time for the boat for Dublin. She had been gone for more than an hour, and the black smoke from her funnel was already fading away into a dim wreath driven rapidly northward before the sharp south-easter coming up the Channel. Night was fast falling, with indications that it would be any thing rather than a quiet one on that wild and turbulent bit of water lying between the two islands; and some of the old Welsh coastmen who yet lingered on the pier, when they saw the impatient man striding up and down and uttering imprecations on the delayed train, shrugged their shoulders with the remark, which he did not hear or did not choose to heed, that "theyshould be much obliged to any train that had kept them from taking a rocking in that cradle the night!"
Brow knit, head bent, tread nervous and almost angry, and manifesting all the symptoms of anxiety and disappointment, the American traversed the wharf, his tall form guarded against the slight chill of the summer evening on the coast by a coarse gray cloak which he drew closely around him as he walked, thus adding to the restless stateliness of his appearance. At one of his turns he was sufficiently disengaged to see a man of middle height, dressed in a somewhat dashingcivilian costume, standing at a little distance up the pier and conversing with two or three of the coastmen. One of the latter was pointing towards himself; and the moment after the stranger approached with a bow. He was a young man of twenty-five or thereabouts, side-whiskered and moustached, decidedly good-looking, with quite as much of the Irishman as the Englishman in his face, and seemed at all points a gentleman—more, that much rarer combination, especially on the soil of the mother island, a frank, clever fellow!
"They tell me, sir," said the stranger, "that you were one of the passengers on that delayed train, and that you manifest some disappointment at missing the Dublin boat."
"They are entirely correct, sir," answered the American, returning the bow. "I was very anxious, for particular reasons, to be in Dublin to-morrow; and in fact the whole object of my visiting Ireland at all, just now, may very probably be defeated by the accident that brought in the train that half hour too late."
He spoke in a tone very earnest and not a little agitated. The other remarked the fact, but he thought himself too good a judge of character to suspect, as some other persons under similar circumstances might have done, that the anxious man was a hunted member of the swell-mob or a criminal of some other order, who thought it politic to get off English soil as soon as possible. He determined, at the second glance, that he had to do with a gentleman, and proceeded with the words that he had evidently intended to say on first accosting the delayed passenger.
"You have made no arrangements for getting over, I suppose?"
"None, whatever!" answered the American. "How can I, until the boat of to-morrow, when—when it may be too late altogether for my purpose? I was walking off my disappointment, a sort of thing that I have been more or less used to all my life!" and the other noticed that he seemed to sigh wearily—"walking it off before going to find a hotel andlying awake all night, thinking of where I ought to have been at each particular hour."
"Well," said the stranger, "I had a motive not personal to myself, in accosting you, or I should not have taken the liberty. I am Mr. Henry Fitzmaurice, one of the London correspondents of the DublinEvening Mail. I believe that I am not mistaken in supposing that I am speaking to an American?"
"Not at all mistaken!" answered the American, pleased with a frankness so much more like that of his native land than he had been in the habit of meeting during his short sojourn abroad. "I am called Mr. Brand—Carlton Brand, and on ordinary occasions I am a lawyer of the city of Philadelphia."
"That little matter over, which I should not have been able to manage under half an hour had I been a pure John Bull instead of two-thirds Irishman," said the man who had introduced himself as Fitzmaurice, in a vivacious manner very well calculated to put the other at his ease—"now, not being either of us members of the Circumlocution Office, we will get at the gist of the matter at once. I am going over to Ireland to-night, or at least I am going to make a start in that direction, and I believe that I can manage to secure you a passage if you will accept one."
"Certainly, and with many thanks, but how?" was the reply.
"Well, I am not so sure about the thanks," said Fitzmaurice, in the same pleasant tone which had before won his companion. "It is going to be a wild night on the Channel, if I am any judge of weather, and I have crossed it often enough to begin to have some idea. But Imustcross, and so must you, if you can, as I understand you to say."
"I must, certainly, if any thing in the shape of a vessel does so," said the American. "But you have not yet told me—"
"No, of course not!" the newspaper man ran on. "Alwaysexpect an Irishman to begin his story in the middle and tell it out at each end, and you will not be far from the fact. Well, there are some despatches for the Lord Lieutenant that need to be across before noon to-morrow, as the Secretary for Ireland has an insane fancy, and a special train left London to make the connection with the steamer that has just gone. I came in it, and with the Queen's messenger,—with some matters that must reach theMailin advance of the other Dublin papers. They have a little despatch-steamer lying just below, and the messenger telegraphed to fire her up, from one of the back stations, when he found the chances against him. In an hour she will have a full head of steam, and before it is quite dark we shall be clear of the coast. I have no doubt that I can procure you a passage, and if you will step round with me to the wharf where she lies, I will certainly try the experiment. Now you have it."
"And a very kind and generous thing I have at the same time!" exclaimed the American, warmly.
"As I said before, I do not know about the generosity!" replied the correspondent, as they took their way around the warehouses that headed the packet-wharf, towards the pier below, where the despatch-boat lay. "The fact is that the Emerald is not much bigger than a yawl, and though she is a splendid little sea-boat and never has found any gale in which she could not outlive the biggest of the merchant steamers, she is very much of a cockle-shell in the way of jumping about; and people who have any propensity for sea-sickness, a thing a good deal worse than any ordinary kind ofdeath, are very likely to have a little turn at it under such circumstances."
"I have never been very much at sea, but I believe that I am beyond the vulgarity of sea-sickness!" was the answer; and just then they reached the despatch-steamer.
She was indeed a little thing, as compared with the steamers which the American had been in the habit of seeing sent away on sea-voyages—very low in hull, rakish in pipeand masts, looming black in the gathering dusk of evening, and her bulwarks seeming so low as to present the same appearance of insecurity against falling overboard that a landsman's eye immediately perceives in a first glance at a pilot-boat. The steam was already well up and hissing from her escape valves, while the black smoke rolled away from her pipe as if it had a mission to cloud the whole port with soot and cinders.
A few words with the Queen's messenger and an introduction to the Captain of the little Emerald followed; and the correspondent of theMailhad not overrated his influence with either, for in ten minutes the lawyer was booked for a passage over, under government auspices. In half an hour more the despatch-boat steamed away; and when the deep dusk of night fell to shut away the Welsh coast, while the half dozen officers and their two passengers were trifling over a very pleasant supper with wines of antediluvian vintage accompanying, the Emerald was well off the Head, tossing about like a cork in the sea that seemed to be every moment growing more and more violent, but making fine weather through it all, flying like a race-horse, and promising, if every thing held, to land the messenger and her other passengers at Kingstown, at very near as early an hour in the morning as those touched the shore who had left Holyhead two hours before by the packet.
The American remained long on the deck, in conversation with the newspaper correspondent, delighted with the cordiality of his manner and the extensive scope of his information, as he had before been with the generosity which supplied himself with a passage over at the moment of disappointment. The Hiberno-Englishman seemed to be equally pleased with his new friend, whom he found all that he had at first believed—a gentleman, and neither pickpocket nor madman. Mr. Fitzmaurice, still a young man and a subordinate, had never been in America, but he had something more than the ordinary newspaper stock of information about countries lying beyondsea, and he had the true journalist's admiration for the young land that has done more for journalism within fifty years than all the other countries of the world through all the ages. He listened with pleasure to the descriptions which the lawyer was equally able and willing to impart, of the modes in which the news-gathering operations of the leading American newspapers were carried on, and especially of the reckless exposures of correspondents on the battle-fields of the great war, which have all the while exhibited so much bravery and so stupendous a spirit of enterprise, combined with a lack of judgment equally injurious and deplorable.
Mr. Fitzmaurice, on his part, resident in London during all the period of our struggle, necessarily present at most of the Parliamentary debates in which the good and ill feeling of Englishmen towards the United States have been shown in such unfavorable proportions—acquainted with most of the leading public men of the kingdom, and with an Irishman's rattle making the conveying of his impressions a thing of equal ease and pleasure,—he had much to say that interested the Philadelphian; and it would have been notable, could he have been fairly behind the curtain as to the character and movements of the other, to mark how the man who during two weeks residence in London had never stepped his foot within the Parliament Houses, could drink in and digest, from another's lips, the story of the debates which he might so easily have heard first-handed with his own ears!
But as the newspaper man could know nothing of this, enough to say that the conversation was a pleasant one, and that hours rolled away unheeded in its continuance, while the little Emerald skimmed over and plunged through the rough waves of the Irish Channel, and while those waves grew heavier, and the sky darker, and the wild south-easter increased every hour in the violence with which it whistled through the scant rigging and sent the caps of the waves whirling and dashing past the adventurous little minnow ofthe steam-navy, to fall in showers of foamy spray far to leeward.
It was past midnight when the young men, so strangely thrown together, so different in position and pursuit, but so pleasantly agreeing in all the amenities of social intercourse,—began to feel the demands of sleep overmastering the excitement of the situation, left the deck and went below to the berths in the little cramped cabin which had been prepared for them. The Queen's messenger had already retired and was sleeping so soundly in his four-by-seven state-room, with his despatches under his pillow, that nothing less than the going to pieces of the steamer or an order to start on a new journey could possibly have woke him. To such men, ever flying from one port to another, by sea and by land, bearing the lives of individuals and often the welfare of whole peoples in their hands, with no more knowledge of what they bear than has the telegraph wire of the message that thrills along it—to such men, habituated to excitement, hurry and exposure, that excitement really becomes a sort of second nature; and the art of sleeping on the ground, on a board, bolt upright in a chair or even in the saddle, is one of the accomplishments soonest learned and last forgotten. What are storms to them or to that other class to which reference has before been made—the rough Ariels of the newspaper Prospero? Nothing, except they cause hindrance! What is even the deepest personal peril by sea or land? Nothing, except because in putting a sudden period to the existence of the messenger it may interfere with the delivery of his all-important despatches!
So slept the Queen's messenger, and so, after a time, in their narrow berths, slept the American and his new-made friend. Once falling away into slumber, the very motion of the vessel made that slumber more intense and stupefying, old Mother Nature rocking her children somewhat roughly in the "cradle of the deep." And of what dreamed they? Who knows? Perhaps the handsome and vivacious youngAnglo-Irishman of the girl whose miniature he had accidentally displayed to the eyes of the other, filling the back case of his watch,—not yet his wife, but to be so some day when talent and energy should bring their recompense and fortune shower her favors a little more liberally upon him. Perhaps the Philadelphia lawyer of wrongs and shames in his native land, of the apparently mad quest which he seemed to be urging, and of possible coming days when all errors should be repaired, and the great stake of his life won beyond a peradventure.
How long the lawyer had slept he knew not, when some change in the motion of the boat produced the same effect on his slumbers that is said to be wrought on the sleeping miller by the stoppage of the splashing water-wheel and the rumbling burr-stones. He had slept amidst the violent motion: he partially woke when there was a momentary cessation of it. In an instant after the vessel seemed to be struck one tremendous blow that sent a shiver through every plate and rivet of her iron hull—through every board and stanchion of her cabin-work. There are men who can remain undisturbed by such a sensation on shipboard, but the American was by no means one of them; and the fumes of sleep, partially dissipated before, rolled away almost as suddenly as morning mists before a brisk north-wester. He was broad awake to feel a hand grasping him by the shoulder, and opened his eyes to see Fitzmaurice standing by the berth and holding the joiner-work with one hand to support himself against the fearful lurches of the vessel, while he had employed the other in arousing the apparently slumbering man.
"Get up and come out at once!" he said, his voice hoarse and agitated.
"What has happened?" asked the American, springing upright in his berth and preparing to leap from it as men will do when such unpleasant announcements are made. He seemed to know, intuitively and without any instruction fromthe shock which had just startled him, that some marked peril must have sent the journalist down to arouse him in that melodramatic manner.
"Why, we are in danger, I suppose—serious danger!" was the reply. "Do you not feel the change in the motion of the boat? We are in the trough of the sea, without steam, and as near as I can make out through the mist, driving on the Irish coast with more rapidity than we bargained for!"
"Heavens!" was the very natural exclamation in reply, as the American managed with some difficulty to throw on the one or two articles of clothing of which he had divested himself.
"I suppose that it is a bad job," the journalist continued, "and what just now makes me feel peculiarly bad about it is the fact that I was the means of inducing you to come on board, and that if any thing serious should happen—"
"Hush! not a word of that!" said the lawyer, appreciating fully that chivalrous generosity which after conferring a great favor could take blame to itself for any peril growing out of that favor. "Hush! You have treated me, Mr. Fitzmaurice, with great kindness, and I hope you will believe me man enough not to misunderstand our relative positions in any thing that may occur."
Fitzmaurice, who seemed to be relieved by the words, but who certainly was laboring under an amount of depression not incident alone to any peril in which he stood personally involved,—grasped his hand with something more than the ordinary pressure of brief acquaintance. The motion of the boat, alternately a roll and then a heavy plunge, had now become absolutely fearful, intermingled with occasional repetitions of that crashing blow which had started the American from his slumber; but holding fast of each other and of various substantial objects that fell in their course, the two young men reached the companion way and the deck, the journalist detailing meanwhile, in hasty and broken words,what he knew of the extent of the difficulty in which they were involved.
Up to fifteen or twenty minutes before, the little Emerald, a capital sea-boat but possessed of but a single engine (which description of single engine boats, by the way, should never be allowed to make voyages by open sea, except under the especial pilotage of one Malthus), had been making good weather, though the blow had increased to a gale and the waves of the Irish Channel increased to such size that they seemed to be opposed to the Union and determined to make an eternal severance of the two islands. Fitzmaurice had himself awoke about an hour before, and gone upon deck because unable to sleep longer; and he had consequently become aware, a little before the American in his berth did so, of an accident to the vessel. One moment of cessation of the plunging roll with which she had been ploughing ahead of the waves breaking on her larboard quarter—a moment of almost perfect stillness, as if the little vessel lay moored in some quiet haven—then a sudden veering round and that terrible crash and shock of the waves under the counter, the wheel, and along the whole side, which told that she was lying helpless in the trough of the sea, a marine Samson as thoroughly disabled as if she had been shorn of all her strength at once by the shears of one of the Fates. A word from one of the officers, the moment afterwards, had told him of some disarrangement of the engine, consequent on the severe strain of the heavy sea upon the boat; and he had then been left to study out for himself the amount of peril that might be involved, and to observe the coolness with which officers and men devoted themselves to a task which might or might not be successful—which might terminate at any moment in one of those terrible seas breaching the little vessel and foundering her as if she had indeed been nothing but a yawl-boat! It was at this stage that he had come down and wakened his friend of a few hours, feeling some responsibility for his safety (as well as a presentiment with regard to himwhich he by no means expressed in words), and leaving the Queen's messenger to pursue his dreamless sleep until it should end in Kingstown harbor or at the bottom of "Davy Jones' locker."
By the time all this had been expressed in one tenth the number of words here employed, they had reached the deck, and certainly the prospect there was any thing but one calculated to reassure either. The Emerald was rolling wheel-houses under, in the trough of the sea, but so far mysteriously relieving herself through the scuppers as it seemed impossible that she should do. Two men were at the wheel, but they stood necessarily idle. Forward were half a dozen men, holding on to keep from going overboard at the first lurch. Even above the roar of the storm could be heard the sharp clink of hammers coming up from the engine-room and each sounding yet one pulse-beat of Hope. The south-easter was howling with demoniac fury, wailing through the rigging as if singing requiems for them all in advance, and driving before it the thin mists that shut away any idea of the sky. By the light on deck and on the troubled expanse of water eastward it was evident that day was breaking; and it was through a knowledge of that fact and of the rate of speed at which they had been steaming and driving partially before the wind all night, that Fitzmaurice had made his calculation expressed below, that they must be close on the Irish coast, a lee-shore, in such a blow, of no pleasant character.
Such was the situation—a deplorable one, as any one can readily perceive who has ever seen its precise parallel; yet not entirely a hopeless one, for they might not be so close upon the coast as had been feared, and the engine might yet be thrown again into gear before the little vessel foundered and in time to claw off from the danger lying to leeward. Fitzmaurice had seen the position before: the American saw it at once through his own eyes and from the explanations given him by the journalist. The moment was not favorable for conversation, in that perilous motion, that roar of windand wave and that suspense of mind; and the two young men held none except in a few words almost shouted to each other, but stood far aft on the larboard quarter, waiting calmly as two men with human instincts could be expected to wait for—what Heaven only knew! The face of the Anglo-Irishman was almost thoughtlessly calm, in spite of the anxiety which he had so plainly expressed: that of the American was dark, his lips set and his brow contracted, but there was no sign of shrinking and no indication of that basest passion, fear! Who could believe that the man standing there in the gray light of morning and awaiting without one apparent tremor of the muscles what might be an immediate and a painful death, bore a name that had been so lately dishonored by the most abject cowardice?
Suddenly there was a cry which has blanched many a cheek and made many a lip tremble since Noah made his first sea-voyage in the Ark: "Land on the starboard quarter!" followed by another and yet more startling call: "Breakers to leeward!"
Fitzmaurice and the American both turned instantly in the direction indicated, as was inevitable; and then they saw that the warning cry from the look-out was not the result of any illusion. The daylight was rapidly broadening, the mist had for the moment driven away leeward; and apparently not more than a mile away rose a huge dark headland assuming the proportions of a mountain, while at its base and in the exact direction towards which the doomed vessel was drifting, the sea was breaking in wreaths of white foam over ledges of rock which seemed to be already so near that they must go grinding and crashing upon them before the lapse of five minutes. They felt that the water shoaled, too, for the plunging roll of the disabled steamer grew every moment more terrible, and just as the cry was given she was breached at the waist by a sea from which she did not immediately clear herself. It only needed an eye that had ever scanned peril by sea and shore, to know at that moment that theEmerald and all on board were as certainly doomed, in all human probability, as if the one had been already broken up and scattered along the coast in fragments and the others made food for fishes along the rocks of Ireland's Eye!
"The Hill of Howth and the rocks at the foot of it!" cried Fitzmaurice as he recognized the position. "Now God help us, for they are dead to leeward, and if we have any accounts to settle we had better settle them rapidly!"
There was little agitation in his tone, now, and there was none in that of the American as he replied two words. They were the last he ever spoke, to mortal ear. May they have been true when he awoke from his long sleep, as they were before he fell into it! Those two words were:
"I see!"
The two men were standing, as has been said, very near the larboard quarter. The Emerald, too, as has also been already said, was very low in the bulwarks, as befitted her rake and her clipper appearance. Just as the lawyer uttered the two words, one of the officers of the steamer came aft, holding on amidst the terrible roll with something of the tenacity of a cat, and took his place at the wheel. The mist had closed down again and the Hill of Howth and the breakers were both for the moment shut away.
There was a jar—a creeping, trembling jar that seemed to run through the little steamer, from stem to stern-post, and yet no blow from the fierce waves and no grinding of her keel upon the dreaded rocks. It was life—motion—the beat of machinery once more! At that critical juncture the engine had moved again for the first time, and if not safety there was yet at least another struggle with destiny. The officer had dashed back to throw the steamer up into the wind, the very instant that he felt the steam once more rushing into the cylinder.
Then followed what cannot be described, because no one living can say precisely what occurred. Gathering way almost in an instant from the mad dash of her wheels into thewater, the little Emerald plunged forward as if for her life. She had but a hundred or two yards of vantage ground left, and seemed to know it. As she gathered way and the quick whirl of the wheel swept her head gradually round to the sea, one mighty wave, as if afraid of being baulked of its prey and determined upon a final effort, struck her under the weather bow and port wheel and sent her careening so low to leeward that the starboard wheel-house and even the starboard quarter-rail were under water. She rolled back again in an instant, triumphant over the great enemy, and thenceforward dashed away from the white breakers on her lee as if she had been merely tantalizing them with a futile prospect of her destruction,—to make her way safely two hours afterwards into Kingstown Harbor and to land the Queen's messenger (who had just then awoke) and the correspondent of theEvening Mail, only an hour later than the passengers by the packet had disembarked.
But she did not land the American. When the steamer rolled down with her starboard quarter-rail under water, Fitzmaurice, standing nearest to the larboard quarter, called out to his companion: "Look out and hold on!" then clutched the bulwark with his own hands and obeyed his own injunction. But when the steamer righted he was alone! Whether the lawyer had missed footing and failed to grasp any point of support at the critical moment, or whether he had lost head in the dizzying motion and gone over without even knowing his danger,—certain it is that he had been swept overboard under circumstances in which the whole British navy could have done no more to save him than one child of ten years! Henry Fitzmaurice, missing him and dreading what had really occurred, thought that for one second he saw a human head, with the hair streaming up, away off in the yeasty water: but that was all. And he said, bitterly, realizing all the painful facts of the event, and taking to himself a thought of regret that was likely to cling to him while his generous heart continued to beat:
"My God!—it was just as I thought! I have been the means of drowning that splendid fellow, after all!"
A few hours later, little Shelah, the barefooted daughter of one of the poor fishermen whose hut stood at the foot of Howth, around northward towards Ireland's Eye—little Shelah, who had gone down over the rocks to the beach when the worst of the storm was over, rushed back to the cabin with terror in her eyes and broken words upon her lips:
"Oh, father!—there bees a man all dead and dhrownded down there by the rocks beyant! And he bees so handsome and so much like a rale gintleman!—how could he dhround? Come down and see till him, father!"
The fisherman went down, and he and his rough mates removed the body and did their humble and ineffectual all to resuscitate a body from which the breath of life had long departed. Then the fisherman and his wife and his mates and little Shelah all mourned over the manly beauty that had been sacrificed, and wondered who he could possibly be, and where his kindred would mourn for him. It was only when Father Michael, the good old priest of the parish was summoned, that they could form any nearer idea of the personality of the drowned man. Then they knew, for Father Michael could read, as they could not, and he told them, from one of the cards in the pocket-book, that "his name had been Carlton Brand, and that he had belonged to Philadelphia, away over in America, where they used to be so free and happy, but where they were fighting, now, all the time, about the naygurs that didn't seem to him worth the throuble!"
They buried him, with such lamentations as they might have bestowed upon "one of their own," in consecrated ground in a little graveyard a mile away from the Hill, westward; and Father Michael gave the dead man the benefit of a benevolent doubt as to his religion, with the remark that "there were good Christians over in America, and this was one of them, maybe!" uttering a prayer for the repose of hissoul that, if it bore him no nearer to the Beautiful Gate, certainly left him no farther away from it, while it fulfilled the behest of a simple and beautiful faith! This done, and a note despatched to his favorite journal, giving the name and place of burial of the unfortunate man, Father Michael felt, as he had reason to feel, that he had done his whole melancholy duty.
Whatever the quest of the American, it was ended: whatever had been the secret of his unrest, it was not a secret to the eyes that thenceforth watched over a destiny no longer temporal but eternal.
It has been suggested that Henry Fitzmaurice, the journalist, so strangely thrown into the company of the Philadelphian, so much pleased with his manner and impressed by his conversation, and so suddenly separated from him by an accident which seemed to have something of his own handiwork in its production,—was likely to bear with him, during life, a regret born of that circumstance. Such being the case, it was eminently natural that in giving a description of the accident to the despatch-steamer and the peril to her passengers, on the day following, in theMail, he should have dwelt at some length on the sad fate of Mr. Carlton Brand, the American, alluded in terms of warm respect to the character which had briefly fallen under his observation, and felicitates the far-away friends of the unfortunate man, on the fact already made public in theNation, that the body had been early recovered and received tender and honorable Christian burial.
Pleasanton's advance on Culpeper—Crossing the Rappahannock—The Fight and the Calamity of Rawson's Cross-Roads—Taking of Culpeper—Pleasanton's Volunteer Aide—Townsend versus Coles—The Meeting of two who Loved each other—And the little Ride they took together.
Pleasanton's advance on Culpeper—Crossing the Rappahannock—The Fight and the Calamity of Rawson's Cross-Roads—Taking of Culpeper—Pleasanton's Volunteer Aide—Townsend versus Coles—The Meeting of two who Loved each other—And the little Ride they took together.
On Sunday the thirteenth day of September, 1863, and Monday the fourteenth, but principally on the former day, took place that running fight which displayed some of the very noblest qualities of the federal cavalry shown during the War for the Union, and which is better entitled than otherwise to be designated as the Battle of Culpeper. One of the first conclusive indications was given in that fight, that while the rebel cavalry, which at the beginning of the war was certainly excellent, had been running down from the giving out of their trained horses, and the deterioration of the quality of their riders through forced conscription,—the Union cavalry, at first contemptible in force and inefficient in comparison to their very numbers, had every day been improving as fast as augmenting, until they had become the superiors of what the best of their foes had been at the beginning of the contest. War can make any thing (except perhaps statesmen) out of a given quantity of American material; but it can unmake as well, when it strains the material existing and creates a forced supply for the vacant places of the dead and the vanquished, out of the infirm and the incapable; and before the end of this conflict the lesson will have been so closely read as never to need a repetition.
The rebels held Culpeper and the south bank of the Rappahannock, and had held the whole of that line for weeks, formidable in their occasional demonstrations, but still more formidable in what it was believed theymightdo by a suddencrossing of that dividing stream at some moment when the Union forces should be deficient in vigilance, preoccupied, or otherwise embarrassed. They were to be driven back if possible, from their threatening front, or if not driven back, at least struck such a blow as would make early offensive operations on their part improbable. These were the intentions, so far as they can be known and judged, which led to the crossing of the Rappahannock at that particular juncture.
At three o'clock on the morning of that Sunday which was to join with so many other days of battle during the rebellion in proving that "there are no Sabbaths in war,"—at an hour when the thick darkness preceding the dawn hung like a pall over the banks of the rugged stream and the hostile forces that fringed it on either side—the cavalry camps on the north side of the Rappahannock were all astir. All astir, and yet all strangely quiet, in comparison with the activity manifested. No mellow bugle rang out its notes of reveille; there was no rattle of drum or shrieking of fife; the laggard sleeper was awakened by a touch on the shoulder, a shake, or a quick word in his ear. Horses were saddled in silence; and at the commands: "Prepare to mount!" "Mount!" given in the lowest possible tones that could command attention, the drowsy blue-jacketted, yellow-trimmed troopers, all be-spurred and be-sabred as if equal foes to the horses they were to ride and the enemies they were to encounter,—vaulted lightly or swung themselves heavily, according to the manner of each particular man, into their high peaked McClellan saddles that seemed to be all that was left them of their old leader. The squadrons were formed as quietly and with as few words as had accompanied the awakening and the mounting; for if a surprise of the enemy's force was to take place, it was a matter of the highest consequence that no loud sound or careless exclamation should reach the ears of the wary pickets and wide-awake videttes of the rebels hugging close the banks on the south side of the narrow river.
The preparations were at last and hastily completed, longbefore the gray dawn after the moonless night had begun to break over the Virginia hills lying dark and cool to the eastward. Perhaps that very morning had been selected for the attack because on the night before the new moon had made its appearance and there was no tell-tale lingerer to throw an awkward gleam on an accoutrement and thus tell a story meant to be concealed. Troopers clustered together and formed squadrons, squadrons were merged into regiments which in turn swelled to brigades and brigades to divisions. It was only then that the extensive nature of the movement, which had Pleasanton at the head and Buford, Gregg and Kilpatrick all engaged in the execution, could have been conjectured even by an eye capable of peering through the darkness. It seemed scarcely an hour after the first awakening when the formation was complete and the order to "March!" given; and there was not even yet a gleam of red in the eastern sky when the whole command was in motion.
This large cavalry force, under Pleasanton as we have said, was composed of three divisions, commanded respectively by Buford, Gregg and Kilpatrick, all Brigadiers. The Rappahannock was crossed at as many different points, Buford with the First going over at Starke's Ford; Gregg, with the Second, at Sulphur Springs, four miles distant; and Kilpatrick, with the Third, at Kelly's Ford, nine miles farther down and thirteen miles distant from the place of crossing of the First. Stuart, the famous "Jeb," with his confederate cavalry, was known to be in force on the elevated ground at and around Culpeper Court House, with his pickets and videttes extending to the very edge of the Rappahannock; and a wide sweep of the Union force was believed to be necessary to circumvent him. Detachments of rebel troops were also known to hold all the prominent points between Culpeper and Brandy Station, where the brigades of Lomax and W. F. H. Lee were lying.
Pleasanton was over the river, with all his force before broad daylight—so rapid and successful had been the movement.The roads were dry and in as good order as Virginia roads are ever allowed to be by the powers that preside over highways; and the force, still in the three divisions, swept southward as silently as iron-shod animals have the capacity for bearing iron-accoutred riders. Napoleonla Petithad never yet succeeded in introducing gutta-percha scabbards for the swords of his troopers and gutta-percha shoes for their horses, even into the French cavalry; and the Yankee troops of Pleasanton had all the disadvantages of the usual rattling of bridle-bits, the clattering of sabres within steel scabbards, and the pounding of multitudinous hoofs upon the hard dry earth, the latter occasionally a little muffled by an inch of gray powdery dust, choking the riders as it made their advance less noisy.
Spite of the clanking of hoof and steel, however, the advance was made with such silence and celerity that the greater portion of the rebel pickets on the southern bank of the Rappahannock were captured, while the remainder—here and there one scenting danger afar off and holding an advantage in knowledge of the roads—fled in dismay to report that the whole Army of the Potomac, sappers and miners, pioneers and pontoniers, horse, foot and dragoons, was closing in upon Culpeper.
As the morning advanced and the light grew stronger, so that the danger and the persons of the attacking forces could at once be better distinguished, skirmishing commenced with that portion of the rebel force, stationed in more or less strength at various points and called to arms by their pickets being driven in upon them,—to meet and if possible check the advancing columns. Not long before they discovered that any effectual check to the forces which Pleasanton seemed to be pouring down every cross road and throwing out from behind every clump of woods on the roadsides, was impossible; and they fell back, skirmishing.
At Brandy Station (droll and unfortunate name, destined to supply more bad jokes at the expense of the dry throatsof the army than almost any other spot on Virginia soil), a junction of the three divisions of Union troops was effected; and there, while that disposition was being made, a sharp fight took place between the First, under Buford, and the rebel cavalry under Colonel Beale of the Ninth Virginia. But that struggle, though sharp, was only of brief continuance: out-foughten, and it must be confessed, outnumbered, the enemy was driven back from the Station and pursued vigorously.
While the gallant Buford was thus occupied with the First, Gregg, with the Second division was making a detour to the right and pouring down his troopers upon Culpeper from the north by the Ridgeville road, driving before him upon the main body at the Court House a rebel brigade that had held the advance, under General Lomax (an officer whose name, we may as well say, apropos of the bad jokes of war-time, had caused nearly as many of those verbal outrages upon English, as the unfortunate Brandy Station itself).
Kilpatrick, meanwhile, with his Third division had not been idle. (When was he ever known to be idle, except when others held him in check, or ineffective except when some other than himself misdirected his dashing energy?) He had swept around to the left, nearly at the same time that Gregg made the detour to the right, and striking the Stevensburgh road advanced rapidly from the east towards Culpeper and the right of the enemy's position, which rested on Rawson's Cross-Roads, two miles south-east of the Court-House. The rebels here made a stubborn resistance, and steel met steel and pistol-shot replied to sabre-stroke as it had not before done that day; but the odds were a little against them; they were outflanked by that incarnate "raider" of the Sussex mountains of New Jersey, who no doubt could trace back some drop of his blood to Johnny Armstrong the riever of the Scottish border, or the moss troopers of the Bog of Allen in Ireland; and they fell back to the town and beyond it, taking up new positions which they were not destined to hold much longer than those they had abandoned.
But this brief shock of battle between the division of Kilpatrick and the rebels opposed to it, did not roll away from the little hamlet of Rawson's Cross-Roads without the enacting of one of those sad tragedies, in the shedding of the blood of non-combatants, which seem so much more painful than the wholesale but expected slaughter of the field. Near the crossing of the roads there stood one brick house, of two stories, the only one of that material in the vicinity. This house, when Kilpatrick came up, was occupied by the rebel sharp-shooters, partially sheltered by the thick walls and bringing down the federal cavalry from their saddles at every discharge of their deadly rifles. Such obstructions in the way of an advance, especially when they destroy as well as embarrass, are not apt to be treated with much toleration by those who have the power to sweep them away; and immediately when the imminence of the danger was discovered, one of the federal batteries was ordered up to dislodge the sharp-shooters. It dashed up with all the celerity that whipped and spurred and galloping horses could give it, halted within point-blank range, unlimbered, and sent shell, canister and case-shot into and through the obnoxious edifice in a manner and with a rapidity little calculated upon by the mason who quietly laid his courses of bricks for the front and side-walls, in the quiet years before Virginia secession. The sharp-shooters were soon silenced and dislodged—at least all of them who were left after the last deadly discharge of missiles had been poured in by the battery; and the house was at once occupied, when the firing ceased, by a detachment of Union cavalry dismounted for that service. When those men entered the half-ruined building they first became aware of this extraordinary and deplorable tragedy, in which a little blood went so far in awakening regret and horror. They heard cries of pain and shrieks of distress and fear, echoing through the building, in other accents than those which could belong to wounded soldiers—the tones of women! And in the cellar they found the painful solution of the mystery—morepainful far, to them, than a hundred times the death and suffering under ordinary circumstances. In that cellar, among smoke, and blood and dust, were huddled twenty or thirty non-combatants, men, women and children; and in their midst lay an old man, quite dead and the upper part of his head half carried away by a portion of shell, while fallen partially across his legs was the body of his son of sixteen, his boyish features scarcely yet stilled in the repose of death from a ghastly hurt that had torn away the arm and a part of the shoulder. Two women lay near, one dying from a blow on the temple which had driven in the bones of the skull like the crushing of an egg-shell, and the other uttering the most heart-rending of the cries and groans under the agony of a crushed leg and a foot literally blown to atoms. A sad sight!—a harrowing spectacle, even for war-time! And how had it been occasioned?
It would seem that on the approach of the cavalry and the commencement of fighting in the neighborhood, this party of non-combatants had crowded into this house—no doubt long to be known in the local traditions of the place as that of James Inskip,—and taken refuge in the cellar, believing that in it, as the only brick house in the vicinity, they would be safest from the missiles of the opposing forces. And so they would have been, safe enough beyond a doubt, had not the rebel commander, unaware of the presence of non-combatants in the building, or heedless of the common law of humanity not to expose them to unnecessary danger in any military operation, recklessly placed his sharp-shooters in shelter there and thus drawn the fire of the fatal battery. Two or three of the shells, crashing through the house, had fallen into the cellar and exploded in the very midst of the trembling skulkers in their place of fancied security,—with the sad results that have been recorded, and which none more deeply deplored than the men who had unwittingly slaughtered the aged and the helpless. Some of the Richmond papers told harrowing stories, a few days after, of the "inhuman barbarity of the dastardlyYankees who wantonly butchered those inoffensive men and helpless women and children in James Inskip's house at Rawson's Cross-Roads"; but they forgot, as newspapers on both sides of the sad struggle have too often done during its continuance, to add one word of the explanatory and extenuating circumstances!
By the time that Kilpatrick, with the Third, had concluded the episode of Rawson's Cross-Roads and driven the opposing forces back upon the town, Buford, with the First, after chasing the rebel cavalry under Beale to moderate satisfaction, had come up from the south, and the junction of the three divisions was accomplished.
On the elevated site of Culpeper and in the uneven streets of that old town which bears, like so many of its compeers, shabby recollections of English aristocracy that for some cause seem to suit it better than the thin pretence of democratic government,—there Stuart, than whom the rebellion has developed no more restless or more active foe of the Union cause, appeared determined to make a last and effectual stand. With a celerity worthy of his past reputation he placed sharp-shooters in houses that commanded the Union advance, planted batteries at advantageous positions in the streets, and threw up barricades of all the unemployed carts and wagons and all the idle timber and loose fence-rails lying about the town, in a manner which would have endeared him to the Parisians of the time of Louis Philippe. Right and left and on every hand, defending these obstructions and supporting the batteries, dashed his mounted "Virginia gentlemen," once the very Paladins of their knightly class, when Fauquier and the White Sulphur saw the pleasant sport of tilting at the ring in the presence of the bright-eyed Queens of Beauty of the Old Dominion,—now brought down to the level and compelled to contest the fatal advance, of a "horde of Yankee tailors on horseback"!
General Pleasanton, the actual as well as nominal head of the Union advance, held his position on an eminence a shortdistance east of the town, from which an excellent view of the whole situation could be commanded, and whence he directed all the movements with the rapidity of a soldier and the coolness of a man thoroughly in confidence with himself and well assured of the material of his command. He had won with the same troops before, even when placed at disadvantage: that day he felt that the game was in his own hands and that he could play it rapidly and yet steadily. The thing which worst troubled him as from that little eminence he looked out from under his bent brows, over the scene which was to witness so short, sharp and decisive a conflict,—was the knowledge how seriously the stubborn resistance offered by the rebels was likely to peril the non-combatants in the town, and how inevitably, from the same cause, the old town itself, just tumble-down enough to be historical and picturesque, must suffer from the flying shot and shell that know so little mercy. He had hoped, the first surprise succeeding, to take Culpeper against but slight resistance; and it was no part of his plan (it neverispart of the plan of any truly brave man!) to batter the town if that measure could be avoided; but the balances and compensations of war are appreciable if not gratifying, musketry on one side is nearly sure to be answered in kind by the other, and artillery (when there happens to be any, and wo to the party without the "big guns" when the other has them at command!)—artillery has a very natural habit of replying to the thunderous defiance sent out by its hostile kinsmen. Culpeper, too well defended, was not the less certain to be taken, while it was the more certain to bear marks of the conflict that only the demolition of half its buildings could erase.
God pity and help the residents of any town given up to the ruthless passions of a fierce soldiery—to plunder and rapine and murder,—after what is so inadequately described as "taking bystorm"! When for the moment hell is let loose upon the earth, as if to teach us that if we have yet something of the god lingering in our fallen manhood, we have yet something of the arch-fiend remaining to show howwe accompanied him in his fall. When roofs blaze because a reckless hand has dashed a torch therein in the very wantonness of destruction. When the golden vessels of the church service and the sacred little memorials of happy hours in boudoir and bed-room are alike torn from their places, dashed into pieces and ground under armed heels, as if the inanimate objects bore a share of the wrong of resistance and could feel a part of the suffering meted out to it. When murder is for the time licensed and the blood of the defender of his door-stone and his hearth dabbles his gray hair on one or the other of those sacred places, and there is no thought of punishment for the red hand, except as God may silently mete it in the years to come. When—saddest and worst of all,—the matron is outraged before the eyes of her bound and blaspheming husband; and young girls, the peach-bloom of maidenhood not yet brushed from the cheek, are torn shrieking from the arms that would shelter them, to be so polluted and dishonored by a ruffian touch that but yesterday would have seemed impossible to their dainty flesh as the rising up of a fiend from the lower pit to rend the white garments of one of the redeemed in heaven,—so polluted and dishonored that a prayer for the mercy of death bubbles up from the lips at the last word before resistance becomes insensibility.
This wreck of a "storm" of human license is terrible—so terrible that the effects of the convulsions of nature, the tempest, the tornado and even the earthquake, sink into insignificance beside them. Heaven be praised that during the War for the Union, called by our English cousins so "fratricidal," we have as yet known no Badajos or even a sacking of Pekin! But only second to such scenes in horror and scarcely second in terror, have been some of those supplied when the battle issue of the two armies was joined near some quiet country town before lying peaceful and inoffensive, or when military necessity has made its houses temporary fortifications and its streets the points of desperate attacks and as desperate defences. Then what crashing of shot and shellthrough houses; what demolition of all that had before been sacred; what huddling together of the frightened and the defenceless who never before dreamed that, though war was in the land, it would break so near tothem; what mad gathering of valuables and impotent preparations for flight that would be more dangerous than remaining; what whistling of bullets that seemed each billeted for a defenceless breast; what thunderous discharges of cannon that made every non-combatant limb quiver and every delicate cheek grow bloodless; what shouts in the street and cries of terror and dismay within doors; what trembling peeps through half-closed shutters, with an imagined death even in every such momentary exposure; what cowerings in cellars and hidings beneath piles of old lumber in garrets; what reports of defeat or victory to the party that was feared or favored; what claspings of children and ungovernable weepings of hysteria; what prayers and what execrations; what breakings-up and destructions of all that had been, and what revelations of the desolation that is to be!
Such, since the breaking out of the rebellion, has been the situation of many a before-peaceful town, in many a State that once rested happily under the shadow of the Eagle's wing. And such was the situation of one fated old town that day, when Gregg from the north, Kilpatrick from the east and Buford from the south, came up almost simultaneously and their forces charged recklessly into the streets of Culpeper Court-House. The excitement and confusion in the town at once became all that we have so feebly endeavored to indicate—women shrieking in terror, soldiers groaning with their wounds, children crying from fright; and blended with these and a hundred other inharmonious sounds, the shouts in the street, the bugle calls, the hissing of bullets, the rumble of artillery wheels, the broken thunder of the feet of trampling horses, the occasional crash of half-demolished houses, and the hoarse roar of the batteries as they belched out their missiles of death and destruction. Culpeper, for a shortperiod, was a veritable pandemonium in miniature; and no detail can add to the force of that brief but comprehensive description.
Near the railroad bridge spanning the little stream running nearly through the centre of the town, the rebels had discovered a strategic point of no little consequence, and they had posted there a battery of several pieces, well served and annoying the advance of the Third division very materially. The battery seemed to be placed there, not only to obstruct the advance but to protect a train of cars just then being loaded by the rebels above, with munitions and other articles of consequence, preparatory to a start down the railroad southward. Battery D., Second New York Artillery, ordered for that service, ran up its sections at a gallop, unlimbered and poured in shot and shell, grape and canister upon the train, in such disagreeable rapidity as sent the half loaded cars away towards the Rapidan with all the speed that could be suddenly mustered. Still the battery at the bridge remained, firing rapidly and cutting up the head of Kilpatrick's column in a manner calculated to make the General gnash his teeth in indignation. The space to the bridge was uphill, accordingly raked downward by the rebel fire; the bridge itself was narrow and the footing for horses seriously damaged by the railroad tracks that crossed it with their switches and lines of slippery iron. Still it was known that that bridge must be cleared, at any cost, or the advance through Culpeper would be a most bloody one if accomplished at all. Just as Kilpatrick was about to order a charge of cavalry to clear that bridge and if possible capture the pieces, his intention seemed to be anticipated and a squadron of Stuart's cavalry rode down and took post, dismounted, behind the battery, in position to support, while three or four companies of rebel riflemen followed, ready to do deadly execution with their pieces against any troops attempting to charge, and to fall upon that force with resistless fury at the moment of their weakness, if the guns should be ridden over! No pleasantprospect, as the Sussex raider thought, and for a moment he apparently wavered in intention, while the battery played heavily and every instant saw one or more of his best troopers biting the dust of the causeway below.
But this momentary indecision, whether or not it would have continued much longer of his own volition, was not destined to do so when the will of another came into play. A horseman dashed rapidly over to the spot where Kilpatrick was momentarily halted, from Pleasanton a few hundreds of yards away, running a fearful gauntlet of the enemy's fire, as he did so, from a battery that had just wheeled into position and opened down a narrow cross-street to the left,—spoke a few quick words to the General and then awaited the movement that was to follow. And it was not long that he or the commander who sent him needed to wait. The command had been: "Clear that bridge and take the battery, at all hazards!" and Kilpatrick only needed that support of his own judgment to order a charge which he would have been best pleased, if he could only have gone back to be a Colonel for a few moments, to lead in person. His eye rolled questioningly over the Third for a moment, and then the rapid words of command followed. Only a certain number of cavalry could be employed upon that dangerous service, without making the carnage greater by throwing the troopers literally in the way of each other; and it was the Second New York, Harris Light Guard, a troop which had already won honor on every field touched by the hoofs of their horses,—called out for that quick, sharp, perilous duty that every squadron in the command probably coveted.
The gallant Second received the order with loud cheers that came nigh to imitating the well-known rebel fox-hunting yell, for some of their best fellows had fallen ingloriously and the human tiger was not only unchained but set on horseback. They formed column by fours with a rapidity which told of the fierce hunger of conflict; and when the bugles rang out the charge, the dusty and smoke-stainedriders returned their now-useless carbines to their slings, drew sabres, and driving their spurs rowel deep into the flanks of horses that seemed almost as anxious as themselves, dashed forward towards the bridge. Their ringing shouts did not cease as they galloped on, and their sword-blades, if they grew thinner in number, still gleamed as brightly as ever in the sunlight, as they measured that narrow but fatal space, while round after round of grape and canister, carbine-bullets, musket-balls and rifle-shots, burst into their faces and mowed down their flanks as they swept on. Saddles were emptied, horses went down with cries of pain more fearful than any that man can utter, and brave men went headlong into the dust from which they would never rise again in life. But the progress of the charging squadron did not seem to be delayed a moment. The rebel gunners of the battery were reloading for yet one more discharge, when, just in the midst of that operation, over the bridge and upon them burst the head of that column which seemed as if nothing in the way of human missiles had power to stay it. Before the gray and begrimed cannoniers could withdraw their rammers the troopers were in their midst. Then followed that fierce cutting and thrusting of artillery swords and cavalry sabres, that interchange of revolver-shots and crushing of human bones under the feet of trampling horses, incident to the taking of any battery that is sharply attacked and bravely defended. A little of this, but still under heavy fire from behind,—and the guns were captured, with all their men and horses left alive.
And yet the work of the Second New York in that quarter was by no means finished. That steady and murderous fire continued from up the street, as the infantry and the dismounted cavalry of the support fell back; and it was only by one more sweeping charge that the annoyance could be removed. Scarcely any one knew whence came the voice that ordered that second charge, but the blood of the troopers was up and they made it gallantly. In three minutes thereafter a brokenand flying mass, far up the street, was all that remained of the supporting force; but a fearfully diminished number of the cavalrymen rode back to assist in sending the captured battery to the rear. We shall have occasion, presently, to know something more of these two charges, undoubtedly the most spirited events of a day on which all the Union troops and many of the rebels reflected honor upon the causes they supported.
Immediately after the clearing of the bridge a gallant dash was made by Gen. Custer, the "boy general with the golden-locks" (the man who has made a solemn vow, it is said, never to shorten those locks until he rides victoriously into Richmond) leading the charge in person, with portions of the First Vermont and First Michigan cavalry, against a section of a battery, stationed nearly a quarter of a mile beyond the bridge and within a hundred or two yards of the front of Stuart's main body. These pieces were worked by as obstinate a set of gray-backs as ever rammed home a rebel cartridge; and the gunners, defiant of Custer's detour to the left to escape a direct raking fire, and apparently relying upon the main body lying so near them, continued to load and fire until the federal leader and his men were literally on the top of the pieces and fairly riding them under foot. Guns and caissons were taken, while the support relied upon seemed to be so paralyzed by the daring of the whole affair as scarcely to offer any resistance,—the horses hitched to the pieces, the guns limbered up, and the rebel gunners even forced to mount and drive their lost cannon to join the others in the rear!
A considerable rebel force of cavalry, artillery and infantry were by this time in full retreat below the town, along the line of the Orange and Alexandria railroad; and the Fifth New York cavalry were sent in pursuit. The gallant troopers of the Fifth charged at a gallop the moment they came within sweeping distance of the foe, but the high embankment of the road broke the charge, and the detour necessaryto make a more advantageous approach deprived the gallant boys of their half-won laurels and allowed the flying enemy to escape.
While Kilpatrick was thus engaged, Buford and Gregg, with the First and Second, had been by no means idle. Dashing into the town, each from his chosen direction, the troopers of each leaped barricades and drove the rebels before them wherever encountered upon open ground; and a part of the force of either division, dismounted, skirmished from corner to corner and dislodged the sharp-shooters one by one from all their holes and hiding-places. Sometimes stubbornly resisted, at others seeming to have no foe worthy of their steel, the three divisions won their way through the old town; and the cavalry of Stuart, up to that time so often declared invincible, were at last driven pell-mell out of Culpeper and back to the momentary refuge of Pony Mountain. Even there they were again dislodged, the First Michigan cavalry accomplishing a feat which might have surprised even Halstead Rowan of this chronicle—routing a whole brigade by charging up a hill so steep that some of the riders slipped backwards over the tails of their horses, their saddles bearing them company!
The town of Culpeper was finally occupied at one o'clock,p. m.; and not many hours after the ridge behind it and Pony Mountain were in the hands of the dashing cavalrymen. Retreating towards the Rapidan, they were pursued towards Raccoon Ford on the left and centre by Buford and Kilpatrick with the First and Third divisions, while Gregg, with the Second, pushed a heavy Rebel force before him to Rapidan Station. By nightfall the rebels had been driven to the north bank of the Rapidan, where both forces bivouacked that night in line of battle.
Monday morning saw the recommencement of hostilities and the retreat of the rebels to the south side of the river, leaving the federal forces to hold the country between the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, with all the strategic pointstherein, Culpeper included. Stuart, it was said, had often boasted that "no Yankee force could drivehimfrom Culpeper!" and if such a boast was really made and afterwards so signally disproved by the "horde of Yankee tailors on horseback," the fact only furnishes one more additional proof to Benedick's declaration that he would live and die a bachelor, so soon followed by his marriage with Beatrice,—that humanity is very uncertain and that human calculations are fallible to a degree painful to contemplate!
Such were the general features of the crossing of the Rappahannock and the Battle of Culpeper, one of the sharpest cavalry affairs of the war, and perhaps more important as illustrating the reliability to which the Union horse had attained from a beginning little less than contemptible, than from the mere military advantage gained by the movement. It now becomes necessary to descend to a few particulars connected with the event of the day, and briefly to trace the influence on the fortunes of some of the leading characters in this narration, exercised by the advance of General Pleasanton and his dashing brigadiers.
It has been seen that at a certain period of that day the division of Kilpatrick was held temporarily in check by the rebel battery posted at the railroad-bridge, and that for a moment the General, aware of the necessity of removing the obstruction if the direct advance through Culpeper was to be continued, yet hesitated in ordering the charge which must be made in the face of such overwhelming difficulty, until a peremptory direction from Pleasanton left him no option in the matter. And it is to personal movements of that particular period that attention must at this moment be directed.