Alexandria,Sept. 17th, 1863.Robert Brand, West Philadelphia,Care Messrs. ——, No. — Market St. Philadelphia.Your son, Carlton Brand, dangerously wounded at Culpeper. Lying in hospital here. If well enough, wish you would come down and see him. He does not know of this.E. H.
Alexandria,Sept. 17th, 1863.
Robert Brand, West Philadelphia,
Care Messrs. ——, No. — Market St. Philadelphia.
Your son, Carlton Brand, dangerously wounded at Culpeper. Lying in hospital here. If well enough, wish you would come down and see him. He does not know of this.
E. H.
"Well, I'll be——!"
It was a plump, round oath that Robert Brand uttered—very improper under any circumstances, and especially so in the presence of ladies,—but about as natural, when all things are considered, as the air he breathed. In order to realize the exact position and the blind astonishment that must have lain in that telegraphic despatch, it is necessary to remember that once before he had heard of the death of the young man, from one who had just seen his lifeless body (Kitty Hood), and that only two hours afterwards his house had been visited by the enraged Dr. Pomeroy to reclaim a girl that the man just before dead was alleged to have stolen! Now, only an hour or two before, he had a second time been informed of his son's death at sea, and burial in Ireland, under such circumstances that mistake seemed to be impossible; and yet here was a telegraphic despatch quite as likely to be authentic if not originating in some unfeeling hoax—informing him that he had been nearly killed in battle, and was lying in one of the Virginia hospitals! At short intervals the young man seemed to die, in different places, and then immediately after to be alive again in other places, under aspects scarcely less painful and yet more embarrassing. There was certainly enough in all this to make the old man's brain whirl, and to overspread the faces of the others with such blank astonishment that they seemed to be little else than demented. There was one, however, not puzzled one whit. That was old Elspeth, who muttered, loudly enough for them all to hear, as she abandoned them to their fate, resigned her temporary position as seeress, and went back to the mundane duties of house-keeping:
"It's not the bairn's ainsel at all that's lying down amang the naygurs where they're fechting. It is his double that's come bock frae the auld land to haunt ye! Come awa, Carlo, lad, and let them mak much of it!"
There is no need to recapitulate all that followed between the three remaining people, surprised in such different degrees—the words in which little Elsie was made to understand the first intelligence, followed by her reading of the whole account in the Irish paper—the hopes, fears, fancies and wild surmises which swept through the brains and hearts of each—the thoughts of Robert Brand over the initials appended to the telegraphic despatch, which for some reason made him much more confident of its authenticity than he would otherwise have been, while they embarrassed him terribly in another direction which may or may not be guessed—the weaving together of three minds that had been more or less separated by conflicting feelings with reference to that very person, into one grand total and aggregate of anxiety which dwarfed all other considerations and made the whole outside world a blank and a nothing in comparison. All this may be imagined: until the perfecting of that invention by which the kaleidoscope is to be photographed in the moment of its revolution, it cannot be set in words. But the result may and must be given.
"I shall go to Washington by the train, to-night," said Robert Brand, when the discussion had reached a certain point, with the mystery thicker than ever and the anxiety proportionately increasing.
"You, father? Are you well enough to go?" and little Elsie looked at him with gratified and yet fearful surprise.
"No matter, I am going!" That was enough, and Elsie knew it. Within the last half hour much of his old self seemed to have returned; and when he assumed that tone, life granted, he would go as inevitably as the locomotive.
"I am glad to hear you say so, Mr. Brand—father!" said Margaret Hayley, very calmly. "It will make it much better, no doubt, forIam going."
"You!" This time there were two voices that uttered the word of surprise.
"Yes,I! If Carlton Brand is lying wounded in a Virginia hospital, I know my duty; and if I must missthat, tohim, or Heaven, henceforward, I shall be among the lost!" Strange, wild, mad words; but how much they conveyed!
"God bless you,my daughter!" "My dear, dearsister!" And somehow three people managed to be included in one embrace immediately after. This was all, worth recording, that the grape trellis saw.
That evening when the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore train left Broad and Prime, it bore Robert Brand and Margaret Hayley, going southward on that singular quest which might end in so sad and final a disappointment.
In the Hospital at Alexandria—The Wounded Man and his Nurse—Sad Omens—A Reunion of Three—Brave Man or Coward?—Who was Horace Townsend?—A Mystery Explained—How Eleanor Hill went back to Dr. Pomeroy's—One word more of the Comanche Rider—Conclusion.
In the Hospital at Alexandria—The Wounded Man and his Nurse—Sad Omens—A Reunion of Three—Brave Man or Coward?—Who was Horace Townsend?—A Mystery Explained—How Eleanor Hill went back to Dr. Pomeroy's—One word more of the Comanche Rider—Conclusion.
Glimpses now, only glimpses—with great breaks between, which the imagination may fill at pleasure. Events, few in number, not less strange, perhaps, than those which have already occurred, but less enwrapped in mystery, and gradually shaping themselves towards the inevitable end.
The military hospital at Alexandria. Outside, dingy and yet imposing, fit type of the State that held it, in the days before secession was any thing more than a crime in thought. Within, a wilderness of low-ceilinged rooms, comfortableenough but all more or less dingy like the exterior. Nine out of ten of them filled with cot-bedsteads arranged in long rows with aisles between; sacred at once to two of the most incongruous exhibitions of human propensity—the blood-thirsty cruelty which can kill and maim,—the angelic kindness which can make a dear child or brother out of the merest stranger and bind up the hurts of a rough, hard-handed, blaspheming ruffian, of blood unknown and lineage uncared for, with all that tender care which could be bestowed upon the gentlest and loveliest daughter of a pampered race when sick or disabled. One of the many places scattered over the loyal States and many portions of the disloyal, made terrible to recollection by the suffering that has been endured within them and the lives that have gone out as a sacrifice to the Moloch of destructive war,—but made holy beyond all conception, at the same time, by the patriotic bravery with which many of their lives have been surrendered to the great Giver for a glorious cause; by the patience with which agony has been endured and almost reckoned as pleasure for the nation's sake; and by the footsteps of the nobler men and if possible still nobler women of America, who have given up ease and comfort and domestic happiness and health and even life itself, to minister to those stricken down in the long conflict.
No need to draw the picture: nothing of war or its sad consequences remains a mystery in this age and to this people. Too many eyes have looked upon the wards of our hospitals, the forms stretched there in waiting for death or recovery, the figures moving around and among them in such ministration as the Good Samaritan may have bestowed upon the bruised and beaten Jew of the parable;—too many ears have listened to the moans of suffering rising up continually like a long complaint to heaven, the sharp screams of agony under temporary pang or fearful operation, the words of content under any lot, blending like an undertone with all, and the words of prayer and Christian dependence crowning and hallowing all;—too many of the men of this time have seen and heardthese things, and too many more may yet have the duty of looking upon them and listening to them, to make either wise or necessary the closer limning of the picture that might otherwise be presented. We have to do with but a little corner of the great building that had been made so useful in the care of the sick and wounded, just as this narration holds involved the interests of a poor half-dozen among the many millions affected by the colossal struggle.
A small room, on the second floor of the building, the walls once white and even now scrupulously clean but dingy from smoke and use. Two windows in it, opening to the west, the tops shaded by paper curtains with muslin inside, while at the bottoms streamed in the soft September afternoon sunlight that lay like a glory over the Virginian woods, so fair to the eye but so foul and treacherous within, stretching away towards the bannered clouds before many hours to shroud the setting of the great luminary. Not one of the common rooms in which, perforce from their number, sick and wounded soldiers must be more or less closely huddled together,—but one devoted to the care of wounded officers, with four beds of iron, neatly made and draped, and at this time only one of them occupied.
We have more than once before had occasion to notice the occupant of that one bed near the head of the room, with a stream of sunshine pouring in at the window and flooding the whole foot. We have before had occasion to remark that tall, slight but sinewy form distending the thin covering as it settled to his shape. Something of his appearance we havenotseen before—the head of hair of an indescribable mixture, half pale gold or light blonde and the other or outer half dark brown or black, scarcely seeming to belong to the same growth unless produced by some mad freak of nature. Nor have we before remarked the splendidly-chiselled face so pale and wan, the life-fluids seeming to be exhausted beneath the skin, from loss of blood and severe suffering. Nor yet that other anomaly—a moustache with the outer ends very dark,almost black, strangely relieved by a crop of light brown beard starting thick and short, like stubble, on the chin. Like this picture in some regards, unlike it in others, the occupant of that bed has before presented, as at this moment, an anomaly equally interesting and puzzling. Wherever and whenever seen, at earlier periods, the last time he met the gaze he was dropping from his horse, a bullet through the body just above the heart, a red sword slipping from his hand and insensibility succeeding to delirium, near the railroad-bridge and the captured rebel battery at Culpeper.
The wounded man lay with his eyes closed and seemed to be in sleep. Beside the bed on a low stool and partially resting against it, was one who slept not—a woman. One elbow resting on the bed-clothes supporting her head, and the other hand holding a book in which she was reading. This was evidently the nurse, and yet scarcely an ordinary nurse charged with the care of all patients, or she could not have afforded the time for watching one convalescent while he slept. She, too, may have been seen before; for something there was in that tall and lithe form, that mass of rich silky brown hair, that face with its mournful eyes and painfully delicate features—something that, once seen, lingered like a sweet, sad dream in the gazer's memory. And yet here, too, if there was an identity, change had been very busy. The form had always been lithe—it was now thin to fragility; the hands had always been taper and delicate—now they were fleshless almost to emaciation; the face had always conveyed the thought of gentleness, helplessness and needful protection—now it seemed less helpless but more mournful, the cheeks a little sunken, and the red spot burning in the centre of either not a close enough semblance of ruddy health to deceive an eye quickened by affectionate anxiety. She was dying, perhaps slowly, it might be rapidly, but dying beyond a peradventure, with that friend or foe which has ushered more human beings into the presence of God than any other disease swayed as an agency by the great destroyer—consumption!
A few moments of silence, unbroken by any sound within the room except the thick breathing of the sleeper: then the girl who sat at his side choked a moment, seemed to make violent efforts to control the coming spasm, but at last yielded, clapped both hands to her left side just above her heart, and broke into one of those terrible fits of coughing which tear away the system as the earthquake rives the solid ground, and which are almost as hard to hear as to endure. Instantly, as the spasm relaxed, she hurriedly drew a white handkerchief from the pocket of her dark dress and wiped her lips. It was replaced so suddenly that the awakened sleeper did not see what stained it—blood, mingled frightfully with the clear white foam.
The eyes of the wounded man opened; and there was something more of himself that came back in the light of their warm hazel, only a little dimmed by suffering, and in the play of all the muscles of the face when awake. Both hands lay outside the bed-clothing; and as she saw the opening of his eyes the girl stretched out her own and took one of them with such gentleness and devotion as was most beautiful to behold. She seemed to be touching flesh that she held to be better than her own—a suggestive rarity in this arrogant world! Something that man had been to her, or something he had done for her, beyond a doubt, which made him the object of a feeling almost too near to idolatry. And yet what had he given her, to win so much? Not wealth—not love: merely true friendship, respect when others despised, and a little aid towards rescue when others turned away or labored to produce final ruin! How easily heaven may be scaled—the heaven of love and devotion if no height beyond,—by that consideration which costs so little, by that kindness which should be a duty if it even brought no recompense!
"There—I have woke you! I am so sorry!" she said, as she met his eyes and touched his hand.
"What consequence, if you have?" was his reply, in a voicelow and somewhat feeble, while his thin hand made some poor attempt at returning her kind pressure. "Ever generous, Eleanor—ever thinking of others and not of yourself! They make angels of such people as you—do you know it?"
"Angels? oh, my God, have I lived to hear that word applied tome?" Such was the answer, and the mournful eyes went reverently upward as she invoked the one holy Name.
"Angels? yes, why not?" said the invalid. "Every light-tongued lover calls his mistress by that name sometime or other, and—"
"Hush, Carlton Brand, hush!"
Some painful chord was touched, and he appeared to understand, as well he might, by what word with two meanings he had lacerated a feeling. He went back to what he had evidently intended to say at first.
"You do not think of yourself, I say. You have been coughing again."
"A little."
"A little? Loudly enough to wake me, and I am a sound sleeper. Eleanor Hill, you are nursing me, when you more need a nurse yourself. I am almost well, you know. You are growing thinner and your cough is worse every day."
"No, Carlton, better—much better!"
"Are you sure? Stop, let me see your handkerchief!" He was looking her steadily in the face, and she obeyed him as if in spite of her own will and because she had always been in the habit of doing so.
"I thought so," he said. "Eleanor, you are very ill. Do not deceive yourself or try to deceiveme."
"Carlton Brand," she answered, returning that look, full in the eyes, and speaking slowly—calmly—firmly. "I am dying, and no one knows the fact better than myself. Thank God that the end is coming!"
"Oh no, you are very ill, but not beyond hope—not dying," he attempted to urge as some modification of the startling confession she had made.
"Yes—the whole truth may as well be told now, Carlton, since we have begun it. I am dying of consumption, and I hope and believe that I shall have but few more days left after you get well enough to leave this hospital."
"Heavens!" exclaimed the wounded man. "If this is true, do you know what you are making of me? Little else than a murderer! I meant it for the best—the best for the country and yourself, when I took you away from the house of your—of Philip Pomeroy, and sent you into this new path of life; but the sleepless hours and over-exertion, the exposures to foul air and draughts and anxiety to which you have been subjected—oh, Eleanor, isthiswhat I have done?"
She slid from her chair and kneeled close beside the bed, bending over towards him with the most affectionate interest.
"Oh no," she said, no agitation in her voice. "Do you think that three months has done this? My family are all consumptive—my father died of the disease. What was done tome"—her voice faltered for just one moment, then she calmed it again by an obvious effort—"What was done tome, was done long before and by another hand."
"Stop!" he interrupted her as she was evidently about to proceed. "Imustsay one word abouthim. Did you ever know all the reason why each of us feared and hated the other so much?"
Merely a sad shake of the head was the negative.
"I will tell you, now. I was a coward, and he knew it. You knew so much before, but nothing else, I believe. He was present once when I fainted at the very sight of blood—something that I believe I always used to do; and he knew of my refusing a challenge because I really dared not fight. He could expose and ruin me, and I feared him. I knew him to be a scoundrel in money affairs as well as in every other way: as a lawyer I could put my finger on a great crime that he had committed to win a large part of his fortune. He knew that I knew it, and that I would have exposed him if I dared. So he feared and hatedme, andeach held the other in check without doing more. It is time that you should know that crime: it was his robbing you of every dollar left you by your father, and putting them all into his own pocket, through the pretended machinery of that Dunderhaven Coal and Mining Company, of which he was President, Director and all the officers!"
"Carlton! Carlton! can this be true, even ofhim?" asked the young girl, horrified at this crowning proof of a depravity beyond conception and yet not beyondfact.
"It is true, every word of it, and if I had not been a wretch unfit to live, I would have exposed and punished him long ago. Lately I think I must have gone through what they call 'baptizing in fire,' and the very day I am able to crawl once more to Dr. Pomeroy's house, I shall force him to meet me in a duel or shoot him down like a dog!"
"This fromyou, Carlton Brand!" The tone was very piteous.
"Yes—why not?" The tone was hard and decided, for a sick man.
"May heaven forgive you the thought. Now listen to me. You have been the dearest friend I ever had in the world. You have been better and truer to me than any brother; and you have done me the greatest of all favors by sending me here to nurse the sick and wounded, to win back something of my lost self-respect and close up a wasted life with a little usefulness before I die! But after all this I shall almost hate you—I shall not be able, I am afraid, to pray for you in that land I am so soon going to visit,—if you do not make me one solemn promise and keep it as you would save your own soul."
There was an agonized earnest in her words and in her manner, as she thus spoke, kneeling there and even clasping her hands in entreaty. Carlton Brand looked at her for one instant with a great pity; then he said:
"Eleanor Hill, if the promise is one that a man can make and a man can keep, I will make it and keep it!"
"Then promise me neither in word nor act to harm Philip Pomeroy. Leave him tome."
"Toyou, poor girl?"
"Tome!Iwill so punish him as no man was ever punished."
"Youpunish him?You, feeble and dying? How?"
"By going back to his house—if they will obey my last wish when the hour comes,—dead."
"Thatwillbe punishment enough, perhaps, even forhim, if he is human!" slowly said the invalid as he took in the thought. "I promise."
"God bless you!" and poor Eleanor Hill fell forward on the bed and burst into sobs that ended the moment after in a fit of still more violent coughing than that which had racked her half an hour previously. And this did not end like the other, but deepened and grew more hoarse until the white froth flew from the suffering lips, followed by a gush of blood that not only dyed the foam but spattered the bed-covering.
"Heavens! see how you are bleeding, my poor girl! You must have help at once!" The face of the speaker, deadly pale and sorely agitated, told how bad a nurse was this choking, dying girl, in his enfeebled condition, with a terrible wound scarcely yet commenced healing.
"No, I do not need help—I shall be better in a moment. But I agitateyou, and I will go away until I have stopped coughing."
Which would be, Carlton Brand thought, perhaps a few moments before she went into that holy presence from which the most betrayed and down-trodden may not be debarred! Ever weakly-loving—ever thoughtless of her own welfare and childishly subservient to the good of others—lacking self-assertion, but never wantonly sinful,—had not that strange thinker, yet under the influence of the fever of his wound, some right to remember Mary's tears, and the blessing to the "poor in heart," promised in the Sermon on the Mount?
But there was real danger to the invalid in this agitation,and the will of another stepped in to remove the danger. Before the poor girl had quite ceased coughing, one of the physicians of the hospital, a gray-haired, benevolent-looking man, stood by the bedside and touched her upon the shoulder.
"Coughing again, and so terribly! What, blood? Fie, fie!—this will never do!" he said. "If the sick nurse the sick, both fare badly, you know. If the scripture doesn't say so, it ought to. You must go away to Mrs. Waldron, Nellie, and keep quiet and not stir out again to-day."
"Yes, Doctor," she answered, rising obediently. "Good-night, Carlton!" She stooped and pressed her lips to the thin hand so touchingly that the doctor, who could scarcely even guess the past relation between the two, almost felt the tears rising as he looked.
"Good-night, and God bless you, Eleanor."
The doctor's eyes followed her as with slow, weak steps she passed out of the room, her pale, mournful face with its hectic cheeks and sad eyes looking back to the bed for an instant as she disappeared. Then he turned away with a sigh—such a sigh of helpless sorrow as he had no doubt often heaved over the living illustrations of those two heart-breaking words—"fading away."
"I am sorry she was here," he said, when she had gone. "I am afraid that she has used up strength that you needed. There are visitors to see you."
"To seeme?"
"Yes—now keep as cool as possible, or I will send them away again. I hate mysteries and surprises; but poor Eleanor does not, and she sent for them, I believe."
"She sent for them? She? Then they are—"
"Keep still, or I will tell you no more—they are two from whom you have been estranged, I think—your father and—"
"My sister?"
"No, the lady is not your sister, I think. She is tall, dark-haired, very beautiful and very queenly. Is that your sister?"
"No—no—that is not my sister—that is—heavens, can thisbe possible, or am I dreaming? Doctor, this agitation is hurting me worse than any presence could do. Send them in and trust me. I will be quiet—I will husband my life, for if I am not mad and you are not trifling, there may yet be something in the world worth living for."
The doctor laid his hand on the pulse of his patient, looked for a moment into his face, and then left the room. The next, two stepped within it—an old man with gray hair rapidly changing to silver, and a woman in the very bloom of youth and beauty. The eyes of the wounded man were closed. What was he doing?—collecting strength, or looking for it where it ever abides? No matter. Only one instant more, and then the two were on their knees by the bedside, where Eleanor Hill had just been kneeling—the father with the thin hand in his and murmuring: "Carlton! my brave, my noble son!" and Margaret Hayley leaning far over the low couch and saying a thousand times more in one long, tender, clinging kiss, light as a snow-flake but loving and warm as the touch of the tropic sun,—that shunned cheek and brow and laid its blessing on the answering lips!
Some of the words of that meeting are too sacred to be given: let them be imagined with the pressure of hands and the hungry glances of eyes that could not look enough in any space of time allotted them. But there were others, following close after, which may and must be given. Whole volumes had been spoken in a few words, and yet the book was scarcely opened,—when Margaret Hayley rose from her knees and bending over the bed ran those dainty white fingers through the strangely mottled hair on the brow of the invalid. Then she seemed to discover something incongruous in different portions of the face; and the moment after, stooping still closer down, she swept away the hair from the brow and scanned the texture of the skin at its edge. A long, narrow scar, its white gloss just relieved on the pallid flesh, crossed the forehead from the left temple to the centre of its apex. She seemed surprised and even frightened; then a look ofmingled shame and pleasure broke over that glorious face, and she leaned close above him and said, compelling his eyes to look steadily into hers:
"Carlton Brand, what does this mean? I know that scar and the color that has once covered that hair and moustache! You are Horace Townsend!"
"IwasHorace Townsend once, for a little while, Margaret," was the reply. "But it won me nothing, and you see for what a stern reality I have given up masquerading."
"Andyouplunged into the Pool to save that drowning boy.Youwent down into that dreadful schute and brought up the Rambler!Youspoke to the Old Man of the Mountain at midnight and carried me away with your words on Echo Lake. Andyou—heaven keep my senses when I think of it!—youmade love to me along the road down the Glen below the Crawford!
"I am afraid I was guilty of all those offences!" answered the invalid, with something nearer to a smile of mischief glimmering from the corner of his eye than had shone there for many a day.
"I did hear something in your voice the first night that I saw you there, and afterwards," Margaret Hayley went on, "which made me shudder from its echo of yours; and more than once I saw that in your face which won me to you without my knowing why. Yet all the impression wore off by degrees, and—only think of it!—I was nearly on the point, at one time, of believing that I had found a truer ideal than the one so lately lost, and of promising to become the wife of Horace Townsend! Think whereyouwould have been, you heartless deceiver, if I had fallen altogether into the trap and done so!"
"I think I might have enduredthatsuccessful rivalry better than any other!" was the very natural reply.
"And this man," said Robert Brand, standing close beside the bed, looking down at his son with a face in which pride and joy had mastered its great trouble of a few days before,and apparently speaking quite as much to himself as to either of his auditors—"this man, capable of such deeds of godlike bravery in ordinary life, and then of winning the applause of a whole army in the very front of battle,—I cursed and despised as a coward! God forgive me!—and you, my son, try to forget that ever I set myself up as your pitiless judge, to be punished as few fathers have ever been punished who yet had the sons of their love spared to them! Margaret—how have we both misunderstood him!"
"The fault was not all yours, by any means," said the invalid. "How could either of you know me when I misunderstood and beliedmyself!"
And in that remark—the last word uttered by Carlton Brand before he yielded to the exhaustion of his last hour of imprudent excitement and fell away to a slumber almost as profound as death, just as the old doctor stepped back to forbid a longer interview, and while the shadows of evening began to fall within the little room, and Margaret Hayley sat by his bedside and held his hand in hers with what was plainly a grasp never to be broken again during the lives of both, and Robert Brand, sitting but a little farther away, watched the son that had been lost and was found, with a deeper tenderness and a holier pride than he had ever felt when bending over the pillow of his sleeping childhood,—in that remark, we say, lay the key to all which had so affected his life, and which eventually gave cause for this somewhat singular and desultory narration.He had misunderstood himself; and only pain, suffering and a mental agony more painful than any physical death, had been able to bring himself and those who best knew him to a full knowledge of the truth. Only a part of that truth he knew even then, when he lay in the officers' ward of the Alexandria hospital: it is our privilege to know it all and to explain it, so far as explanation can be given, in a few words.
Carlton Brand had been gifted, and cursed, from childhood, with an intense and imaginative temperament, never quiteregulated or even analyzed. His sense of honor had been painfully delicate—his love of approbation so strong as to be little less than a disease. Some mishap of his weak, hysterical and short-lived mother, no doubt, had given him one terrible weakness, entirely physical, but which he believed to be mental—he habitually fainted at the sight of blood. (This fact will explain, parenthetically, why he fell senseless and apparently dead at that period in the encounter with Dick Compton when the blood gushed over the face of the latter from his blow; and why after each of the excitements of the Pool and Mount Willard he suffered in like manner, at the instant when his eyes met the fatal sign on the faces of the rescued.) High cultivation of the imaginative faculty, the habit of living too much within himself, and a constitutional predisposition in that direction, had made him painfullynervous—a weakness which to him, and eventually to others, assumed the shape of cowardice. Recklessly brave, in fact, and never troubled by that nervousness for one moment when his sympathies were excited and his really magnificent physical and gymnastic powers called into play,—that fainting shudder at the sight of blood had been all the while his haunting demon, disgracing him in his own eyes and marring a life that would otherwise have been very bright and pleasant. One belief had fixed itself in his mind, long before the period of this narration, and never afterwards (until now) been driven thence—thatif he should ever be brought into conflict among deadly weapons, this horror of blood would make him run away like a poltroon, disgracing himself forever and breaking the hearts of all who loved him. This belief had made his commission in the Reserves a melancholy farce; this had placed him in the power of Dr. Philip Pomeroy and prevented that exposure and that punishment so richly deserved; this had made his life, after the breaking out of the war, one long struggle to avoid what he believed must be disgraceful detection. Once more, so that the matter which informs this whole relation may be fairly understood,—CarltonBrand, merely a high-strung, imaginative, nervous man, with the bravery of the old Paladins latent in his heart and bursting out occasionally in actions more trying than the facing of any battery that ever belched forth fire and death,—had all the while mistaken that nervousness for cowardice;—just as many a man who has neither heart, feeling nor imagination, strides through the world and stalks over the battle-field, wrapped in his mantle of ignorance and stolidity, believing himself and impressing the belief upon others, that this is indomitable bravery.
What Carlton Brand had believed himself to be when untried—what Carlton Brand had proved himself to be when hatred to Captain Hector Coles and a despairing hope of yet winning the love of Margaret Hayley moved him to the trial—how thorough a contrast!—how exact an antagonism! And how many of us, perhaps, going backward from the glass in which we have more or less closely beheld our natural faces, forget, if we have ever truly read, "what manner of men" we are!
And here another explanation must follow, as we may well believe that it followed between the three so strangely reunited, when rest and repose had worn off the first shock of meeting and made it safe for the petted invalid to meet another pressure from those rose-leaf lips that had forsaken all their pride to bend down and touch him with a penitent blessing—safe to speak and to hear of the many things which the parted always treasure against re-union. That explanation concerns the mystery of the passenger by the Cunarder, the American in England, and the man who under the name of Carlton Brand perished from the deck of the Emerald off Kingstown harbor? Had he a double life as well as a double nature? Or had there been some unaccountable personation? The latter, of course, and from causes and under circumstances not one whit surprising when the key is once supplied.
It will be remembered that Carlton Brand, very soon after his purchase of a ticket for Liverpool by the Cunard steamerand his indulging that nervousness which he believed to be cowardice with a little shuddering horror at the mass of coal roaring and blazing in the furnaces of the government transport, early in July,—had a visiter at his rooms at the Fifth Avenue Hotel—Henry Thornton, of Philadelphia, a brother lawyer and intimate friend. It will also be remembered that the two held a long and confidential conversation, very little of the purport of which was then given. The facts, a part of them thus far concealed, were that Carlton Brand, flying from his disgrace, really intended to go to Europe as he had informed Elsie; that he made no secret of that disgrace, to Thornton; that the latter informed him, incidentally, of what he had heard of the summer plans of Margaret Hayley and her mother, whom he knew through his family; that the passage-ticket, lying upon the table, came under the notice of Thornton, inducing the information that he was also on his way to England, in chase of a criminal who had absconded with a large sum of money belonging to one of the Philadelphia banks, and whom he had means, if once he could overtake him, of forcing to disgorge; that Thornton half-jestingly proposed, remembering their partial resemblance, that if his friend had grown ashamed of his name, he would take that and the ticket and pursue the criminal with less chance of being evaded, his own cognomen being kept in the dark; that Brand, suddenly taken with the idea and struck with the facility which the use of his name by the other would furnish for creating the belief that he had himself gone abroad, and thus concealing his identity while remaining at home, adopted the suggestion and supplied his friend at once with name and ticket, for his travelling purposes; that it was Henry Thornton and not Carlton Brand who ran that mad quest about England, a hidden criminal always in view, and frequenting the most doubtful places and the most disreputable society to accomplish the object of his search; and that it was poor Thornton and not Carlton Brand who perished in the Irish Channel and met that lowly grave in the Howth church-yard.All this while the real owner of that name, shaving away his curling beard, tinging his fair skin with a very easily-obtained chemical preparation, dyeing black his hair and moustache and making himself up as nearly as possible like Thornton, under the assumed designation of Horace Townsend, suggested by the initials of his "double," was carrying out that long masquerade which we have been permitted to witness.
The peculiarities which he developed in that masquerade, should by this time be reasonably well understood; the motives which kept him near the woman who had once loved him but afterwards cast him off forever, may easily be guessed by many a man, correspondingly situated, who has thus fluttered moth-like around his destroying candle; the half-maddening effect produced upon him by the magnificent scenery of the mountains, the displays of reckless courage made by Halstead Rowan and the marked admiration of Margaret Hayley for those displays, was no matter for surprise when such surroundings for such a temperament were considered; the attempt to become his own rival and win the woman he so wildly worshipped from himself, was not crazier than might have been expected from the man who could have exhibited all the preceding anomalies; and after Margaret had declared her unalterable love but her invincible determination never to marry the man who dared not fight for his native land,—the feeling compounded of hope and despair, which sent him down to the Virginia battle-fields, first as a mere spectator under the favor of his old friend Pleasanton and then as a mad Berserk running a course of warlike fury which made even gray-bearded veterans shudder,—this need astonish no one who has seen how human character changes and develops its true components in the crucible of love, shame and sorrow!
Be sure that Margaret Hayley, too, in that day of the clearing away of mists and mysteries, made one explanation—not to the ears of Robert Brand, but to those of Carltonalone. An explanation that was really a confession, as it told him of the means through which the property held by her family (oh, how the magnificent face alternately flushed and paled when opening this sore wound of her pride!) had been acquired many years before. But be sure that all this was made a recommendation rather than a shame in the eyes of Carlton Brand, when he knew that from the day of his own dismissal her knowledge of that family stain had been used to keep Mrs. Burton Hayley quiet and subservient, to hold Captain Hector Coles at a safe distance, and to enforce what she had truly intended ifheshould never honorably beckon her again to his bridal bed—a life of loneliness for his sake!
Something that occurred a month later—in October, when nature had put on those gorgeous but melancholy robes of gold and purple with which in America she wraps herself when Proserpine is going away from Ceres to the darkness and desolation of winter.
One day during that month a close carriage drove down the lane leading from the Darby road past the house of Dr. Pomeroy. It was drawn by a magnificent pair of horses, but they were driven much more slowly than we have once seen them pursuing the same course. A single figure was seated in it, with face at the window, when it drew up at the doctor's gate; and out of it stepped Nathan Bladesden, the Quaker merchant.
The face was calm, as beseemed his sect, but very stern. A little changed, perhaps, since the early summer, with a shadow more of white dashed into the trim side-whiskers and one or two deeper lines upon the brow and at the corners of the mouth. A step, as he said a word to the driver and entered the gate, which comported with the stern gravity of the face and the slow rate at which he had been driven. Something in the whole appearance indicating that he had come upon a painful duty, but one that he would do if half the powers of both worlds should combine to prevent him.
He saw no one as he approached the piazza and the closed front door; but as he was about to ring, a female servant came out, closed the door again behind her and stopped as if surprised at seeing him.
"Is Doctor Philip Pomeroy at home?" he asked.
"Yes," was the answer, after one instant of hesitation,—"yes, but—"
"That was all I asked thee, woman!" answered the Quaker, sternly. "I came to see him and I must do so. Show me to him at once."
The girl hesitated again, looked twice at him and once at the one open window of the parlor, then obeyed the behest, opened the front door, pointed to that leading into the parlor from the hall, and said:
"He is there, Mr. Bladesden. If youmustsee him, you had better knock, for he may not like to be disturbed."
She went out at once, leaving the front door half open, and glancing back, as she passed it, at the tall, powerful man with the gray hair and side-whiskers, just applying his knuckles to the panel. There was something strange and even startled in her look, but she said no more, left him so and went on upon her errand.
The Quaker knocked twice or three times before there was any answer from within. Nor was the door opened even then, but the voice of the doctor said: "Come in!" and he entered. Doctor Philip Pomeroy sat alone in the room, in a large chair, leaning far back, his arms folded tightly on his breast and his head so thrown forward that he looked up from beneath bent brows. He evidently saw his visitor and recognized him, and yet he did not rise or change his position. And quite a moment elapsed before he said, in a voice frightfully hoarse:
"What do you want here, Nathan Bladesden?"
"I have business with thee, Doctor Philip," was the reply.
"And I do not choose to do business to-day, with any one, nor withyouas long as I live!" said the same hoarse voice.
"And I choose that theeshalldo business to-day and withme!" was the second reply, still equable in tone but still terribly earnest.
Doctor Philip Pomeroy unfolded his arms and rose slowly from his chair. The Quaker, as he did so and was thus thrown into a better light, saw that his face was haggard, that his sharp, scintillant eyes were wild, and that he looked years older than when he had beheld him last, four months before. Standing, and with one hand on the chair as if he needed support, he said:
"Nathan Bladesden, I told you, the last time that you visited this house, never to come near it again, and I thought that you knew me too well to intrude again uninvited."
"It is because I know thee very well indeed, that Ihaveintruded, as thee calls it!" answered the Quaker, with what would have been a sneer on another face and from other lips. "I remember the last time I came here, Doctor Philip, quite as well as thee does, and I promised thee some things then that I am quite as likely to fulfil as thee is to carry out any of thy threats. Besides, thee may be sure that I have business, or I should not have come, for thy company is not so attractive as that men of good character seek it of their own will!"
The Quaker had no doubt expected that by that time he would break out into rough violence, as before; but he had misjudged. From some cause unknown he did not, though the wild eyes grew more than scintillant—they glared like those of a wild beast at once in pain and at bay. And he made no answer except a "Humph!" that seemed to be uttered between closed lips—half an expression of contempt and half a groan.
Nathan Bladesden, intent upon his "business," went on.
"I will not trouble thee long, Dr. Philip, but thee had better pay attention to what I say, for I am very much in earnest and not to be trifled with, to-day, as thee will discover. If thee remembers, I came here the last time to rescue Eleanor Hill from thy villainous hands—"
"Eleanor Hill!" This was not an exclamation of surprise, but a veritable groaning-out of the name.
"Yes, Eleanor Hill," pursued Bladesden,—"after thee had broken off my marriage with her by poisoning my mind against the poor girl thee had ruined in body and soul and I believe robbed in fortune. The morning of that day I had been weak, and driven away by thee: that afternoon I had been moved to do my duty and to take her away from the hands of a seducer and a scoundrel—to shelter the lamb from the wolf, though it was torn and bleeding—to make her my sister if I could not make her my wife."
"Is that all—all? If not, go on!" groaned out the hoarse voice through the set teeth.
"No, there is somewhat more, Dr. Philip—and that of the most consequence," the Quaker continued. "When I came, the poor girl was gone—gone from thee as well as from me. Then I heard that she had gone among the soldiers of the army, doing the work of the Master and healing the sick. She was away fromtheeand doing the duty of merciful woman, and I was content to wait until she had finished. But to-day I learned that yesterday she came back again."
"Oh, my God!—he will kill me!" groaned the answering voice, deeper and more hoarse than ever. But the Quaker went mercilessly on.
"No, I think that I shall not have need!" he said. "Thee is cowardly as well as base, and thee will obey and save thy life. I heard, I say, that she had come back to this house of pollution, and I have come to take her away. Give her up to me, at once, that I may place her where thee can never harm her and never even see her more, and that is all I ask of thee: refuse me or try to prevent my removing her, and I will take thee by the throat, here, now, with these hands that thee sees are strong enough to do the duty of the hangman—and strangle thee to death!"
There was fearful intensity, very near approaching momentary madness, in the voice and whole manner of NathanBladesden, before he had concluded that startling speech; but if he could have looked keenly enough he might have seen on the face of the doctor something more terrible than any word he had uttered or any gesture he could make. His eyes rolled wildly with a glare that was only one remove from maniacy; his whole countenance was so fearfully contorted that he might have seemed in the last agony; and his frame shook to such a degree that the very chair he held jarred and shivered on the floor with the muscular action.
"God of heaven, Nathan Bladesden!" he said, the hoarseness of his voice changed into a wild cry. "Are you mad, or amI? You know that Eleanor Hill came back here yesterday, and you have come to take her away from me to-day?"
"I have come for that purpose, and I will do it, Doctor Philip," replied the Quaker. "Thee has my warning, and thee had better heed it. Let me see her at once, and then if she does not herself ask to be left with thee and the disgrace of thy house, thee shall see her no more, if I can prevent it, until the judgment!"
For one moment, then, without another word, Dr. Philip Pomeroy looked at the speaker steadily as his own terrible situation would permit. Then he seemed to have arrived at some solution of a great mystery, or to have sprung to a desperate resolution, for he sprang forward, grasped the Quaker so suddenly that the latter for the moment started in the expectation of personal violence, dragged him to the door separating the parlor from a smaller one at the rear, and dashed it open, with the words:
"There is Eleanor Hill! Ask her if she will go with you or remain withme!"
The room was partially shaded by heavy curtains; and Nathan Bladesden, stepping hastily therein, did not at first see what it contained. But when he did so, as he did the instant after, no wonder that even his stern, strong nature was not quite proof against the shock, and that he recoiled and uttered an exclamation of affright. For Eleanor Hill was thereindeed, but scarcely within the reach of human wish or question—coffined for the grave, the glossy brown hair smoothed away from a forehead on which rested neither the furrow of pain nor the mark of shame, the sad eyes closed in that long peaceful night which knows no waking from sleep until the resurrection morning, the thin hands folded Madonna-like upon the breast, and one lingering flush of the hectic rose of consumption in the centre of either pale cheek, to restore all her childish beauty and carry the flower-symbol of human love into the very domain of death.
"That is Eleanor Hill—why do you not ask her the question?" Oh, what agony there was in that poor attempt at a taunt!
"No, thee has made her what she is—thee may keep her, now!"
The Quaker's words were a far bitterer taunt than that which had fallen from the lips of the doctor. Then he seemed to soften, went up to the coffin, looked steadily on the dead face for a moment, stooped and pressed his lips on the cold, calm brow, and said, with a strange echo of what Carlton Brand had uttered in the hospital but a few weeks before:
"They have such people as thee in heaven, Eleanor! Farewell!"
He turned away and seemed about to leave the room and the house, but the hand of Dr. Philip Pomeroy was again upon his arm, grasping it and holding him while the frame shivered with uncontrollable emotion and the broken voice groaned out:
"Nathan Bladesden, you hate me, and perhaps you have cause. You are a cold, stern man, with no mercy, and my tortures must be pleasure to you. Enjoy them all! And if any man ever doubts the existence of hell in your presence, tell him that you have seen it with your own eyes in the house of Philip Pomeroy, when the only woman he ever loved in the world lay dead before him, murdered by his own hand, and a devil stood by, taunting him with his guilt!"
"I will taunt thee no more, Doctor Philip!" fell slowly from the Quaker's lips. "I hate thee no longer. I pity thee. Thy Maker is dealing with thee now, and thy punishment is enough!"
He turned away, then, and left the suffering man still within the room beside the dead. Once as he passed into the hall he looked back and saw through the still open door a dark form fall forward with a groan, the head against the coffin and the arms clasping it as if it had been a living thing.
There are two endings to the story of "Faust"—that marvellous wierd history of human love and demoniac temptation which alike in drama and opera enraptures the world, and once before alluded to in this narration. In the older and coarser version, when the ruin is full accomplished and the hour of penalty full ripe, Marguerite is seen ascending heavenward, while Mephistopheles laughs hoarsely and points downward to the lower pit, whence arise blue flames and horrible discords, and into which the doomed Faust is seen to be dragged at the last moment by the hands of the swarming and gibbering monsters. In the other and yet more terrible version, Maguerite is seen ascending, and the laugh of the demon is heard, but it is only a faint, fading, mocking laugh, as evenheflies away and leaves the man accursed kneeling in hopeless agony over the dead form from which the pure spirit has just gone upward—condemned, not to the pit and the flame, but to that worse hell of living alone and without hope, racked by love that has come in its full force when too late, and by a remorse that will worse clutch at his heart-strings than all the fiends of perdition could do at the poor body which coffers his soul of torment. Who does not know how much the more dreadful is that second doom? Who does not—let him never tempt God and fate by making the rash experiment!
Nathan Bladesden was right—even for such sins as those Doctor Philip Pomeroy had committed, the reckoning was fearful!
Poor Eleanor Hill had been right, too, when she said: "Leave him to me! * * * I will so punish him as no man was ever punished!"
Shall there not be one glimmer more of sunshine after the dark night and the storm? Thank heaven, yes!—in a far-off glance at fortunes left long in abeyance but not forgotten.
Lying on the sofa at Mrs. Burton Hayley's, one evening when the first fires of winter had not long been lighted,—still taking the privilege of the invalid though no longer one, and making a pillow of the lap of Margaret Hayley, her dainty white fingers playing with his clustering golden blonde hair as they had erewhile done among the summer rose-leaves,—a quick, warm, happy kiss stolen now and again when the dignified lady, of the mansion was too busy with the devoutly-religious work that she was reading, to be horrified by such immoral practices,—lying thus, and the two talking of dear little Elsie's coming happiness and their own which was not to be much longer deferred; of the restored pride and renovated health of Robert Brand—quite as dear to Margaret, since that day in the garden, as to the son and daughter of his own blood; of the delirious joy and dreadfully broad Scotch of old Elspeth Graeme since the return of her "bonny bairn;" of poor Eleanor Hill and Captain Hector Coles, dead so differently on the fatal Virginian soil; of these and others, and of all the events which had been so strangely crowded within the compass of little more than half a year,—lying thus and talking thus, we say, Carlton Brand drew from his pocket a little fragment clipped from a newspaper, and said:
"By the way, Margaret, here is something that I found in one of the Baltimore papers yesterday. It concerns some friends of ours, whom we may never meet again, but whom neither of us, I think, will ever quite forget. Read it."
Margaret Hayley took the slip and read, what writer and reader may be pardoned for looking over her fair rounded shoulder and perusing at the same moment—this satisfactory and significant item: