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Title: In the three zones

Author: Frederic Jesup Stimson

Release date: June 20, 2022 [eBook #68351]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1893

Credits: D A Alexander and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by University of California libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE THREE ZONES ***





  In the Three
  Zones


  By F. J. Stimson (J. S. of Dale)


  =Dr. Materialismus.= His Hypothesis Worked Out

  =An Alabama Courtship.= Its Simplicities and its Complexities

  =Los Caraqueños.= Being the Life History of Don Sebastian Marques
  del Torre and of Dolores, his wife, Condesa de Luna


  Charles Scribner’s Sons
  New York, 1893




  _Copyright, 1893, by
  Charles Scribner’s Sons_


  TROW DIRECTORY
  PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
  NEW YORK




WORKS OF FICTION

BY

F. J. STIMSON

(_J. S. of Dale_)


  FIRST HARVESTS,                              CLOTH, $1.25
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DR. MATERIALISMUS

HIS HYPOTHESIS WORKED OUT


I SHOULD like some time to tell how Tetherby came to his end;
he, too, was a victim of materialism, as his father had been before
him; but when he died, he left this story, addressed among his papers
to me; and I am sure he meant that all the world (or such part of it as
cares to think) should know it. He had told it, or partly told it, to
us before; in fragments, in suggestions, in those midnight talks that
earnest young men still have in college, or had, in 1870.

Tetherby came from that strange, cold, Maine coast, washed in its
fjords and beaches by a clear, cold sea, which brings it fogs of winter
but never haze of summer; where men eat little, think much, drink
only water, and yet live intense lives; where the village people, in
their long winters away from the world, in an age of revivals had
their waves of atheism, and would transform, in those days, their pine
meeting-houses into Shakspere clubs, and logically make a cult of
infidelity; now, with railways, I suppose all that has ceased; they
read Shakspere as little as the scriptures, and the Sunday newspaper
replaces both. Such a story--such an imagination--as Tetherby’s, could
not happen now--perhaps. But they take life earnestly in that remote,
ardent province; they think coldly; and, when you least expect it,
there comes in their lives, so hard and sharp and practical, a burst of
passion.

He came to Newbridge to study law, and soon developed a strange
faculty for debate. The first peculiarity was his name--which first
appeared and was always spelled, C. S. J. J. Tetherby in the catalogue,
despite the practice, which was to spell one’s name in full. Of
course, speculation was rife as to the meaning of this portentous
array of initials; and soon, after his way of talk was known, arose a
popular belief that they stood for nothing less than Charles Stuart
Jean Jacques. Nothing less would justify the intense leaning of his
mind, radical as it was, for all that was mystical, ideal, old. But
afterwards we learned that he had been so named by his curious father,
Colonel Sir John Jones, after a supposed loyalist ancestor, who had
flourished in the time of the Revolution, and had gone to Maine to get
away from it; Tetherby’s father being evidently under the impression
that the two titles formed a component part of the ancestor’s identity.

Rousseau Tetherby, as he continued to be called, was a tall, thin,
broad-shouldered fellow, of great muscular strength and yet with feeble
health, given to hallucinations and morbid imaginations which he would
recount to you in that deep monotone of twang that seemed only fit
to sell a horse in. The boys made fun of Tetherby; he bore it with a
splendid smile and a twinkle in his ice-blue eye, until one day it
went too far, and then he tackled the last offender and chucked him
off the boat-house float into the river. He would have rowed upon the
university crew, but that his digestion gave out; strong as he was in
mind and body, nothing, that went for the nutrition and fostering of
life, was well with him. Such men as he are repellent to the sane, and
are willed by the world to die alone.

       *       *       *       *       *

Some one on that night, I remember, had said something derogatory about
Goethe’s theory of colors. A dry subject, an abstruse subject, a
useless subject--as one might think--but it roused Tetherby to sudden
fury. He made a vehement defence of the great poet-philosopher against
the dry, barren mathematics of the Newtonian science.

“Do you cipherers think all that is reducible to numbers? to so many
beats per second, like your own dry hearts? Sound may be nothing but a
quicker rattle--is it but a rattle, the music in your souls? If light
is but the impact of more rapid molecules, does MAN bring nothing
else, when he worships the glory of the dawn? You say, tones are a
few thousand beats per second, and colors a few billion beats per
second--what becomes of all the numbers left between? If colored lights
count all these billions, up from red to violet, and white light is
the sum of all the colors, what can be its number but infinity? But is
a white light GOD? Or would you cipherers make of God a cipher? Smoke
looks yellow against the sky, and blue against the forest--but how can
its _number_ change? You, who make all to a number, as governments
do to convicts in a prison! I tell you, this rage for machinery will
bear Dead Sea fruit. You confound man’s highest emotions with the
tickling of the gray matter in his brain; that way lies death and
suicide of the soul----”

We stared; we thought he had gone crazy.

“Goethe and Dante still know more about this universe than any
cipherer,” he said, more calmly. And then he told us this story; we
fancied it a nightmare, or a morbid dream; but earnestly he told it,
and slowly, surely, he won our hearts at least to some believing in the
terror of the tale.

When he was through, we parted, with few words, thinking poor Tetherby
mad. But when he died it was found among his papers, addressed to
me. Materialism had conquered him, but not subdued him; “say not the
struggle naught availed him” though he left but this one tract behind.
It is only as a sermon that it needs preserving, though the story of
poor Althea Hardy was, I believe, in all essentials true.

       *       *       *       *       *

I was born and lived, until I came to this university, in a small town
in Maine. My father was a graduate of B---- College, and had never
wholly dissolved his connection with that place; probably because
he was there are not unfavorably know to more acquaintances, and
better people, than he elsewhere found. The town is one of those
gentle-mannered, ferocious-minded, white wooden villages, common
to Maine; with two churches, a brick town-hall, a stucco lyceum, a
narrow railway station, and a spacious burying-ground. It is divided
into two classes of society: one which institutes church-sociables,
church-dances, church-sleighing parties; which twice a week, and
critically, listens to a long and ultra-Protestant, almost mundane,
essay-sermon; and which comes to town with, and takes social position
from, pastoral letters of introduction, that are dated in other
places and exhibited like marriage certificates. I have known the
husbands at times get their business employments on the strength
of such encyclicals (but the ventures of these were not rarely
attended with financial disaster, as passports only hinder honest
travellers); the other class falling rather into Shakespeare clubs,
intensely free-thinking, but calling Sabbath Sunday, and pretending
to the slightly higher social position of the two. This is Maine, as
I knew it; it may have changed since. Both classes were in general
Prohibitionists, but the latter had wine to drink at home.

In this town were many girls with pretty faces; there, under that
cold, concise sky of the North, they grew up; their intellects
preternaturally acute, their nervous systems strung to breaking
pitch, their physical growth so backward that at twenty their figures
would be flat. We were intimate with them in a mental fellowship. Not
that we boys of twenty did not have our preferences, but they were
preferences of mere companionship; so that the magnanimous confidence
of English America was justified; and anyone of us could be alone with
her he preferred from morn to midnight, if he chose, and no one be
the wiser or the worse. But there was one exceptional girl in B----,
Althea Hardy. Her father was a rich ship-builder; and his father, a
sea-captain, had married her grandmother in Catania, island of Sicily.
With Althea Hardy, I think, I was in love.

In the winter of my second year at college there came to town a certain
Dr. Materialismus--a German professor, scientist, socialist--ostensibly
seeking employment as a German instructor at the college; practising
hypnotism, magnetism, mesmerism, and mysticism; giving lectures on
Hegel, believing in Hartmann, and in the indestructibility of matter
and the destructibility of the soul; and his soul was a damned one, and
he cared not for the loss of it.

Not that I knew this, then; I also was fascinated by him, I suppose.
There was something so bold about his intellectuality, that excited my
admiration. Althea and I used to dispute about it; she said she did
not like the man. In my enthusiasm, I raved to her of him; and then, I
suppose, I talked to him of her more than I should have done. Mind you,
I had no thought of marriage then; nor, of course, of love. Althea was
my most intimate friend--as a boy might have been. Sex differences were
fused in the clear flame of the intellect. And B---- College itself was
a co-educational institution.

The first time they met was at a coasting party; on a night of
glittering cold, when the sky was dusty azure and the stars burned
like blue fires. I had a double-runner, with Althea; and I asked the
professor to come with us, as he was unused to the sport, and I feared
lest he should be laughed at. I, of course, sat in front and steered
the sled; then came Althea; then he; and it was his duty to steady her,
his hands upon her waist.

We went down three times with no word spoken. The girls upon the other
sleds would cry with exultation as they sped down the long hill; but
Althea was silent. On the long walk up--it was nearly a mile--the
professor and I talked; but I remember only one thing he said. Pointing
to a singularly red star, he told us that two worlds were burning
there, with people in them; they had lately rushed together, and, from
planets, had become one burning sun. I asked him how he knew; it was
all chemistry, he said. Althea said, how terrible it was to think of
such a day of judgment on that quiet night; and he laughed a little, in
his silent way, and said she was rather too late with her pity, for it
had all happened some eighty years ago. “I don’t see that you cry for
Marie Antoinette,” he said; “but that red ray you see left the star in
1789.”

We left Althea at her home, and the professor asked me down to his.
He lived in a strange place; the upper floor of a warehouse, upon a
business street, low down in the town, above the Kennebec. He told me
that he had hired it for the power; and I remembered to have noticed
there a sign “To Let--One Floor, with Power.” And sure enough, below
the loud rush of the river, and the crushing noise made by the cakes of
ice that passed over the falls, was a pulsing tremor in the house, more
striking than a noise; and in the loft of his strange apartment rushed
an endless band of leather, swift and silent. “It’s furnished by the
river,” he said, “and not by steam. I thought it might be useful for
some physical experiments.”

The upper floor, which the doctor had rented, consisted mainly of a
long loft for manufacturing, and a square room beyond it, formerly the
counting-room. We had passed through the loft first (through which
ran the spinning leather band), and I had noticed a forest of glass
rods along the wall, but massed together like the pipes of an organ,
and opposite them a row of steel bars like levers. “A mere physical
experiment,” said the doctor, as we sank into couches covered with
white fur, in his inner apartment. Strangely disguised, the room in
the old factory loft, hung with silk and furs, glittering with glass
and gilding; there was no mirror, however, but, in front of me, one
large picture. It represented a fainting anchorite, wan and yellow
beneath his single sheepskin cloak, his eyes closing, the crucifix he
was bearing just fallen in the desert sand; supporting him, the arms
of a beautiful woman, roseate with perfect health, with laughing, red
lips, and bold eyes resting on his wearied lids. I never had seen such
a room; it realized what I had fancied of those sensuous, evil Trianons
of the older and corrupt world. And yet I looked upon this picture; and
as I looked, some tremor in the air, some evil influence in that place,
dissolved all my intellect in wild desire.

“You admire the picture?” said Materialismus. “I painted it; she was
my model.” I am conscious to-day that I looked at him with a jealous
envy, like some hungry beast. I had never seen such a woman. He laughed
silently, and going to the wall touched what I supposed to be a bell.
Suddenly my feelings changed.

“Your Althea Hardy,” went on the doctor, “who is she?”

“She is not _my_ Althea Hardy,” I replied, with an indignation
that I then supposed unreasoning. “She is the daughter of a retired
sea-captain, and I see her because she alone can rank me in the class.
Our minds are sympathetic. And Miss Hardy has a noble soul.”

“She has a fair body,” answered he; “of that much we are sure.”

I cast a fierce look upon the man; my eye followed his to that picture
on the wall; and some false shame kept me foolishly silent. I should
have spoken then.... But many such fair carrion must strew the path of
so lordly a vulture as this doctor was; unlucky if they thought (as he
knew better) that aught of soul they bore entangled in their flesh.

“You do not strain a morbid consciousness about a chemical reaction,”
said he. “Two atoms rush together to make a world, or burn one, as we
saw last night; it may be pleasure or it may be pain; conscious organs
choose the former.”

My distaste for the man was such that I hurried away, and went to
sleep with a strange sadness, in the mood in which, as I suppose,
believers pray; but that I was none. Dr. Materialismus had had a
plum-colored velvet smoking-jacket on, with a red fez (he was a sort of
beau), and I dreamed of it all night, and of the rushing leather band,
and of the grinding of the ice in the river. Something made me keep my
visit secret from Althea; an evil something, as I think it now.

The following day we had a lecture on light. It was one in a course
in physics, or natural philosophy, as it was called in B---- College;
just as they called Scotch psychology “Mental Philosophy,” with capital
letters; it was an archaic little place, and it was the first course
that the German doctor had prevailed upon the college government to
assign to him. The students sat at desks, ranged around the lecture
platform, the floor of the hall being a concentric inclined plane; and
Althea Hardy’s desk was next to mine. Materialismus began with a brief
sketch of the theory of sound; how it consisted in vibrations of the
air, the coarsest medium of space, but could not dwell in ether; and
how slow beats--blows of a hammer, for instance--had no more complex
intellectual effect, but were mere consecutive noises; how the human
organism ceased to detect these consecutive noises at about eight per
second, until they reappeared at sixteen per second, the lowest tone
which can be heard; and how, at something like thirty-two thousand
per second these vibrations ceased to be heard, and were supposed
unintelligible to humanity, being neither sound nor light--despite
their rapid movement, dark and silent. But was all this energy
wasted to mankind? Adverting one moment to the molecular, or rather
mathematical, theory--first propounded by Democritus, re-established by
Leibnitz, and never since denied--that the universe, both of mind and
matter, body and soul, was made merely by innumerable, infinitesimal
points of motion, endlessly gyrating among themselves--mere points,
devoid of materiality, devoid also of soul, but each a centre of
a certain force, which scientists entitle _gravitation_,
philosophers deem _will_, and poets name _love_--he went on
to Light. Light is a subtler emotion (he remarked here that he used
the word _emotion_ advisedly, as all emotions alike were, in
substance, the subjective result of merely material motion). Light is
a subtler emotion, dwelling in ether, but still nothing but a regular
continuity of motion or molecular impact; to speak more plainly,
successive beats or vibrations reappear intelligible to humanity as
light, at something like 483,000,000,000 beats per second in the red
ray. More exactly still, they appear first as _heat_; then as red,
orange, yellow, all the colors of the spectrum, until they disappear
again, through the violet ray, at something like 727,000,000,000
beats per second in the so-called chemical rays. “After that,” he
closed, “they are supposed unknown. The higher vibrations are supposed
unintelligible to man, just as he fancies there is no more subtle
medium than his (already hypothetical) ether. It is possible,” said
Materialismus, speaking in italics and looking at Althea, “_that
these higher, almost infinitely rapid vibrations may be what are called
the higher emotions or passions--like religion, love and hate--dwelling
in a still more subtle, but yet material, medium, that poets and
churches have picturesquely termed heart, conscience, soul_.” As he
said this I too looked at Althea. I saw her bosom heaving; her lips
were parted, and a faint rose was in her face. How womanly she was
growing!

From that time I felt a certain fierceness against this German doctor.
He had a way of patronizing me, of treating me as a man might treat
some promising school-boy, while his manner to Althea was that of an
equal--or a man of the world’s to a favored lady. It was customary for
the professors in B---- College to give little entertainments to their
classes once in the winter; these usually took the form of tea-parties;
but when it came to the doctor’s turn, he gave a sleighing party to the
neighboring city of A----, where we had an elaborate banquet at the
principal hotel, with champagne to drink; and returned driving down the
frozen river, the ice of which Dr. Mismus (for so we called him for
short) had had tested for the occasion. The probable expense of this
entertainment was discussed in the little town for many weeks after,
and was by some estimated as high as two hundred dollars. The professor
had hired, besides the large boat-sleigh, many single sleighs, in one
of which he had returned, leading the way, and driving with Althea
Hardy. It was then I determined to speak to her about her growing
intimacy with this man.

I had to wait many weeks for an opportunity. Our winter sports at
B---- used to end with a grand evening skating party on the Kennebec.
Bonfires were built on the river, the safe mile or two above the
falls was roped in with lines of Chinese lanterns, and a supper of
hot oysters and coffee was provided at the big central fire. It was
the fixed law of the place that the companion invited by any boy was
to remain indisputably his for the evening. No second man would ever
venture to join himself to a couple who were skating together on that
night. I had asked Althea many weeks ahead to skate with me, and she
had consented. The Doctor Materialismus knew this.

I, too, saw him nearly every day. He seemed to be fond of my company;
of playing chess with me, or discussing metaphysics. Sometimes
Althea was present at these arguments, in which I always took the
idealistic side. But the little college had only armed me with Bain
and Locke and Mill; and it may be imagined what a poor defence I
could make with these against the German doctor, with his volumes
of metaphysical realism and his knowledge of what Spinoza, Kant,
Schopenhauer, and other defenders of us from the flesh could say on my
side. Nevertheless, I sometimes appeared to have my victories. Althea
was judge; and one day I well remember, when we were discussing the
localization of emotion or of volition in the brain:

“Prove to me, if you may, even that every thought and hope and feeling
of mankind is accompanied always by the same change in the same part of
the cerebral tissue!” cried I. “Yet that physical change _is_ not
the soul-passion, but the effect of it upon the body; the mere trace in
the brain of its passage, like the furrow of a ship upon the sea.” And
I looked at Althea, who smiled upon me.

“But if,” said the doctor, “by the physical movement I produce the
psychical passion? by the change of the brain-atoms _cause_ the
act of will? by a mere bit of glass-and-iron mechanism set _first_
in motion, I make the prayer, or thought, or love, _follow_, in
plain succession, to the machine’s movement, on every soul that comes
within its sphere--will you then say that the metaphor of ship and wake
is a good one, when it is the wake that _precedes_ the ship?”

“No,” said I, smiling.

“Then come to my house to-night,” said the doctor; “unless,” he added
with a sneer, “you are afraid to take such risks before your skating
party.” And then I saw Althea’s lips grow bloodless, and my heart
swelled within me.

“I will come,” I muttered, without a smile.

“When?” said the professor.

“Now.”

Althea suddenly ran between us. “You will not hurt him?” she said,
appealingly to him. “Remember, oh, remember what he has before him!”
And here Althea burst into a passion of weeping, and I looked in wild
bewilderment from her to him.

“I vill go,” said the doctor to me. “I vill leafe you to gonsole her.”
He spoke in his stronger German accent, and as he went out he beckoned
me to the door. His sneer was now a leer, and he said:

“I vould kiss her there, if I vere you.”

I slammed the door in his face, and when I turned back to Althea her
passion of tears had not ceased, and her beautiful bright hair lay in
masses over the poor, shabby desk. I did kiss her, on her soft face
where the tears were. I did not dare to kiss her lips, though I think
I could have done it before I had known this doctor. She checked her
tears at once.

“Now I must go to the doctor’s,” I said. “Don’t be afraid; he can do me
or my soul no harm; and remember to-morrow night.” I saw Althea’s lips
blanch again at this; but she looked at me with dry eyes, and I left
her.

The winter evening was already dark, and as I went down the streets
toward the river I heard the crushing of the ice over the falls. The
old street where the doctor lived was quite deserted. Trade had been
there in the old days, but now was nothing. Yet in the silence, coming
along, I heard the whirr of steam, or, at least, the clanking of
machinery and whirling wheels.

I toiled up the crazy staircase. The doctor was already in his room--in
the same purple velvet he had worn before. On his study table was a
smoking supper.

“I hope,” he said, “you have not supped on the way?”

“I have not,” I said. Our supper at our college table consisted of
tea and cold meat and pie. The doctor’s was of oysters, sweetbreads,
and wine. After it he gave me an imported cigar, and I sat in his
reclining-chair and listened to him. I remember that this chair
reminded me, as I sat there, of a dentist’s chair; and I good-naturedly
wondered what operations he might perform on me--I helpless, passive
with his tobacco and his wine.

“Now I am ready,” said he. And he opened the door that led from his
study into the old warehouse-room, and I saw him touch one of the
steel levers opposite the rows of glass rods. “You see,” he said, “my
mechanism is a simple one. With all these rods of different lengths,
and the almost infinite speed of revolution that I am able to gif them
with the power that comes from the river applied through a chain of
belted wheels, is a rosined leather tongue, like that of a music-box
or the bow of a violin, touching each one; and so I get any number of
beats per second that I will.” (He always said _will_, this man,
and never _wish_.)

“Now, listen,” he whispered; and I saw him bend down another lever in
the laboratory, and there came a grand bass note--a tone I have heard
since only in 32-foot organ pipes. “Now, you see, it is Sound.” And he
placed his hand, as he spoke, upon a small crank or governor; and, as
he turned it slowly, note by note the sound grew higher. In the other
room I could see one immense wheel, revolving in an endless leather
band, with the power that was furnished by the Kennebec, and as each
sound rose clear, I saw the wheel turn faster.

Note by note the tones increased in pitch, clear and elemental. I
listened, recumbent. There was a marvellous fascination in the strong
production of those simple tones.

“You see I hafe no overtones,” I heard the doctor say. “All is simple,
because it is mechanism. It is the exact reproduction of the requisite
mathematical number. I hafe many hundreds of rods of glass, and then
the leather band can go so fast as I will, and the tongue acts upon
them like the bow upon the violin.”

I listened, I was still at peace; all this I could understand, though
the notes came strangely clear. Undoubtedly, to get a definite
finite number of beats per second was a mere question of mathematics.
Empirically, we have always done it, with tuning-forks, organ-pipes,
bells.

He was in the middle of the scale already; faster whirled that distant
wheel, and the intense tone struck C in alt. I felt a yearning for
some harmony; that terrible, simple, single tone was so elemental,
so savage; it racked my nerves and strained them to unison, like
the rosined bow drawn close against the violin-string itself. It
grew intensely shrill; fearfully, piercingly shrill; shrill to the
rending-point of the tympanum; and then came silence.

I looked. In the dusk of the adjoining warehouse the huge wheel was
whirling more rapidly than ever.

The German professor gazed into my eyes, his own were bright with
triumph, on his lips a curl of cynicism. “Now,” he said, “you will have
what you call emotions. But, first, I must bind you close.”

I shrugged my shoulders amiably, smiling with what at the time I
thought contempt, while he deftly took a soft white rope and bound me
many times to his chair. But the rope was very strong, and I now saw
that the frame-work of the chair was of iron. And even while he bound
me, I started as if from a sleep, and became conscious of the dull
whirring caused by the powerful machinery that abode within the house,
and suddenly a great rage came over me.

I, fool, and this man! I swelled and strained at the soft white ropes
that bound me, but in vain.... By God, I could have killed him then and
there!... And he looked at me and grinned, twisting his face to fit his
crooked soul. I strained at the ropes, and I think one of them slipped
a bit, for his face blanched; and then I saw him go into the other room
and press the last lever back a little, and it seemed to me the wheel
revolved more slowly.

Then, in a moment, all was peace again, and it was as if I heard a low,
sweet sound, only that there was no sound, but something like what you
might dream the music of the spheres to be. He came to my chair again
and unbound me.

My momentary passion had vanished. “Light your cigar,” he said, “it has
gone out.” I did so. I had a strange, restful feeling, as of being at
one with the world, a sense of peace, between the peace of death and
that of sleep.

“This,” he said, “is the pulse of the world; and it is Sleep. You
remember, in the Nibelung-saga, when Erda, the Earth spirit, is
invoked, unwillingly she appears, and then she says, _Lass mich
schlafen_--let me sleep on--to Wotan, king of the gods? Some of
the old myths are true enough, though not the Christian ones, most
always.... This pulse of the earth seems to you dead silence, yet the
beats are pulsing thousands a second faster than the highest sound....
For emotions are subtler things than sound, as you sentimental ones
would say; you poets that talk of ‘heart’ and ‘soul.’ We men of science
say it this way: That those bodily organs that answer to your myth of a
soul are but more widely framed, more nicely textured, so as to respond
to the impact of a greater number of movements in the second.”

While he was speaking he had gone into the other room, and was bending
the lever down once more; I flew at his throat. But even before I
reached him my motive changed; seizing a Spanish knife that was on the
table, I sought to plunge it in my breast. But, with a quick stroke of
the elbow, as if he had been prepared for the attempt, he dashed the
knife from my hand to the floor, and I sank in despair back into his
arm-chair.

“Yes-s,” said he, with a sort of hiss of content like a long-drawn
sigh of relief. “Yes-s-s--I haf put my mechanik quickly through the
Murder-motif without binding you again, after I had put it back to
sleep.”

“What do you mean?” I said, languidly. How could I ever hope to win
Althea away from this man’s wiles?

“When man’s consciousness awakes from the sleep of the world, its first
motive is Murder,” said he; “you remember the Hebrew myth of Cain?” and
he laughed silently. “Its next is Suicide; its third, Despair. This
time I have put my mechanik quickly through the Murder movement, so
your wish to kill me was just now but momentary.”

There was an evil gleam in his eye as he said this.

“I leafe a dagger on the table, because if I left a pistol the subject
would fire it, and that makes noise. Then at the motion of Suicide
you tried to kill yourself: the suicide is one grade higher than the
murderer. And now, you are in Despair.”

He bent the lever further down and touched a small glass rod.

“And now, I will gife to you--I alone--all the emotions of which
humanity is capable.”

How much time followed, I know not; nor whether it was not all a dream,
only that a dream can hardly be more vivid--as this was--than my life
itself. First, a nightmare came of evil passions; after murder and
suicide and despair came revenge, envy, hatred, greed of money, greed
of power, lust. I say “came,” for each one came on me with all the
force the worst of men can feel. Had I been free, in some other place,
I should inexorably have committed the crimes these evil passions
breed, and there was always some pretext of a cause. Now it was revenge
on Materialismus himself for his winning of Althea Hardy; now it was
envy of his powers, or greed of his possessions; and then my roving
eye fell on that strange picture of his I mentioned before; the face
of the woman now seemed to be Althea’s. In a glance all the poetry,
all the sympathy of my mind or soul that I thought bound me to her had
vanished, and in their place I only knew desire. The doctor’s leer
seemed to read my thoughts; he let the lever stay long at this speed,
and then he put it back again to that strange rhythm of Sleep.

“So--I must rest you a little between times,” he said. “Is my fine poet
convinced?”

But I was silent, and he turned another wheel.

“All these are only evil passions,” said I, “there may well be
something physical in them.”

“Poh--I can gife you just so well the others,” he sneered. “I tell you
why I do not gife you all at once----”

“You can produce lust,” I answered, “but not love.”

“Poh--it takes but a little greater speed. What you call love is but
the multiple of lust and cosmic love, that is, gravitation.”

I stared at the man.

“It is quite as I say. About two hundred thousand vibrations make in
man’s cerebrum what you call lust; about four billion per second,
that is gravitation, make what the philosophers call will, the poets,
cosmic love; this comes just after light, white light, which is the
sum of all the lights. And their multiple again, of love and light,
makes many sextillions, and that is love of God, what the priests name
religion.”... I think I grew faint, for he said, “You must hafe some
refreshments, or you cannot bear it.”

He broke some raw eggs in a glass, in some sherry, and placed it by my
side, and I saw him bend the lever much farther.

“Perhaps,” I spoke out, then, “you can create the emotion, or the
mental existence--whatever you call it--of God himself.” I spoke with
scorn, for my mind was clearer than ever.

“I can--almost,” he muttered. “Just now I have turned the rhythm to the
thought millions, which lie above what you call evil passions, between
them and what you call the good ones. It is all a mere question of
degree. In the eye of science all are the same; morally, one is alike
so good as the other. Only motion--that is life; and slower, slower,
that is nearer death; and life is good, and death is evil.”

“But I can have these thoughts without your machinery,” said I.

“Yes,” said he, “and I can cause them with it; that proves they are
mechanical. Now, the rhythm is on the intellectual-process movement;
hence you argue.”

Millions of thoughts, fancies, inspirations, flashed through my brain
as he left me to busy himself with other levers. How long this time
lasted I again knew not; but it seemed that I passed through all the
experience of human life. Then suddenly my thinking ceased, and I
became conscious only of a bad odor by my side. This was followed in a
moment by an intense scarlet light.

“Just so,” he said, as if he had noted my expression; “it is the eggs
in your glass, they altered when we passed through the chemical rays;
they will now be rotten.” And he took the glass and threw it out the
window. “It was altered as we passed through the spectrum by no other
process than the brain thinks.”

He had darkened the room, but the light changed from red through
orange, yellow, green, blue, violet; then, after a moment’s darkness,
it began again, more glorious than before. White, white it was now,
most glorious; it flooded the old warehouse, and the shadows rolled
from the dark places in my soul. And close on the light followed Hope
again; hope of life, of myself, of the world, of Althea.

“Hope--it is the first of the motions you call virtuous,” came his
sibilant voice, but I heeded him not. For even as he spoke my soul was
lifted unto Faith, and I knew that this man lied.

“I can do but one thing more,” said he, “and that is--Love.”

“I thought,” said I, “you could make communion with the Deity.”

“And so I could,” he cried, angrily, “so I could; but I must first give
my glass rod an infinite rotation; the number of vibrations in a second
must be a number which is a multiple of _all_ other numbers,
however great; for that even my great fly-wheel must have an infinite
speed. Ah, your ‘loft with power’ does not give me that.... But it
would be only an idea if I could do that too, nothing but a rhythmic
motion in your brain.”...

Then my faith rose well above this idle chatter. But I kept silence;
for again my soul had passed out of the ken of this German doctor.
Althea I saw; Althea in the dark room before me; Althea, and I had
communion with her soul. Then I knew indeed that I did love her.

The ecstasy of that moment knew no time; it may have been a minute or
an hour, as we mortals measure it; it was but an eternity of bliss to
me.... Then followed again faith and hope, and then I awoke and saw
the room all radiant with the calm of that white light--the light that
Dante saw so near to God.

But it changed again to violet, like the glacier’s cave, blue like the
heavens, yellow like the day; then faded through the scarlet into night.

Again I was in a sea of thoughts and phantasies; the inspiration of a
Shakespeare, the fancy of a Mozart or a Titian, the study of a Newton,
all in turn were mine. And then my evil dreams began. Through lust to
greed of power, then to avarice, hatred, envy, and revenge, my soul was
driven like a leaf before the autumn wind.

Then I rose and flew at his throat once more. “Thou liest!” I cried.
“Heed not the rabble’s cry--God lies NOT in a rotting egg!”

I remember no more.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I regained consciousness it was a winter twilight, and the room
was cold. I was alone in the doctor’s study and the machinery in the
house was stilled.... I went to the eastern window and saw that the
twilight was not the twilight of the dawn. I I must have slept all
day.... As I turned back I saw a folded paper on the table, and read,
in the doctor’s hand:

“In six hours you have passed through all the thoughts, all the wills,
and all the passions known to devils, men, or angels. You must now
sleep deeply or you die. I have put the lever on the rhythm of the
world, which is Sleep.

“In twelve hours I shall stop it, and you will wake.

“Then you had better go home and seek your finite sleep, or I have
known men lose their mind.”

       *       *       *       *       *

I staggered out into the street, and sought my room. My head was still
dizzy, my brain felt tired, and my soul was sere. I felt like an old
man; and yet my heart was still half-drunk with sleep, and enamoured
with it, entranced with that profound slumber of the world to which all
consciousness comes as a sorrow.

The night was intensely cold; the stars were like blue fires; a heavy
ox-sledge went by me, creaking in the snow. It was a fine night for the
river. I suddenly remembered that it must be the night for the skating
party, and my engagement with Althea. And with her there came a memory
of that love that I had felt for her, sublimated, as it had been,
beyond all earthly love.

I hurried back to my room; and as I lit the lamp I saw a note addressed
to me, in her handwriting, lying on my study table. I opened it; all it
contained was in two phrases:

  “Good-by; forgive me.

                                             “ALTHEA.”

I knew not what to think; but my heart worked quicker than my brain. It
led me to Althea’s house; the old lady with whom she lived told me that
she had already started for the skating party. Already? I did not dare
to ask with whom. It was a breach of custom that augured darkly, her
not waiting for me, her escort.

On my way to the river I took the street by the house of Materialismus.
They were not there. The old warehouse was dark in all its windows. I
went in; the crazy wooden building was trembling with the Power; but
all was dark and silent but the slow beating of the Power on the Murder
pulse.

I snatched up the Spanish dagger where it still lay on the table, and
rushed out of that devil’s workshop and along the silent street to the
river. Far up the stream I could already make out a rosy glow, the
fires and lanterns of the skating party. I had no skates, but ran out
upon the river in a straight line, just skirting the brink of the falls
where the full flood maned itself and arched downward, steady, to its
dissolution in the mist. I came to the place of pleasure, marked out by
gay lines of paper lanterns; the people spoke to me, and some laughed,
as I threaded my way through them; but I heeded not; they swerving and
darting about me, like so many butterflies, I keeping to my line. By
the time I had traversed the illuminated enclosure I had seen all who
were in it. Althea was not among them.

I reached the farthest lantern, and looked out. The white river
stretched broad away under the black sky, faintly mirroring large,
solemn stars. It took a moment for my eyes, dazzled by the tawdry
light, to get used to the quiet starlight; but then I fancied that I
saw two figures, skating side by side, far up the river. They were well
over to the eastern shore, skating up stream; a mile or more above them
the road to A---- crossed the river, in a long covered bridge.

I knew that they were making for that road, where the doctor doubtless
had a sleigh in waiting. By crossing diagonally, I could, perhaps, cut
them off.

“Lend me your skates,” I said to a friend who had come up and stood
looking at me curiously. Before he well understood, I had torn them off
his feet and fitted them to my own; and I remember that to save time
I cut his ankle-strap off with the Spanish knife. A moment more and I
was speeding up the silent river, with no light but the stars, and no
guide but the two figures that were slowly creeping up in the shadow of
the shore. I laughed aloud; I knew this German beau was no match for me
in speed or strength. I did not throw the knife away, for I meant more
silent and more certain punishment than a naked blow could give. The
Murder motive still was in my brain.

I do not know when they first knew that I was coming. But I soon saw
them hurrying, as if from fear; at least her strokes were feeble, and
he seemed to be urging, or dragging her on. By the side of the river,
hitched to the last post of the bridge, I could see a single horse and
sleigh.

But I shouted with delight, for I was already almost even with them,
and could easily dash across to the shore while they were landing. I
kept to my straight line; I was now below the last pier of the bridge;
and then I heard a laugh from him, answering my shout. Between me and
the bank was a long open channel of rippling dark water, leading up and
down, many miles, from beneath the last section of the bridge.

They had reached the shore, and he was dragging her, half reluctant, up
the bank. In a minute, and he would have reached his horse.

I put the knife between my teeth and plunged in. In a few strokes of
swimming I was across; but the ice was shelving on the other side, and
brittle; and the strong stream had a tendency to drag me under. I got
my elbows on the edge of ice, and it broke. Again I got my arms upon
the shelving ice; it broke again. I heard a wild cry from Althea--I
cursed him--and I knew no more.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I next knew life, it was spring; and I saw the lilac buds leafing
by my window in the garden. I had been saved by the others--some of
them had followed me up the river--unconscious, they told me, the
dagger still clinched in my hand.

Althea I have never seen again. First I heard that she had married him;
but then, after some years, came a rumor that she had not married him.
Her father lost his fortune in a vain search for her, and died. After
many years, she returned, alone. She lives, her beauty faded, in the
old place.




AN ALABAMA COURTSHIP

ITS SIMPLICITIES AND ITS COMPLEXITIES




1.


I MUST first tell you how I came to be ever a commercial
traveller. My father was a Higginbotham--one of the Higginbothams of
Salem--but my mother, Marie Lawrence, was a far-off cousin of the wife
of old Thomas Lawrence, the great tobacconist of New York. Horatio
Higginbotham was both an author and an artist, but he neither wrote nor
painted down to the popular taste; and as he was also a gentleman, and
had lived like one, he left very little money. Not that he took it with
him when he died, but he had spent it on the way. It costs considerable
to get through this world, if you travel first-class and pay as you go.
And, at least, my father left no debts.

He left my dear mother, however, and his assets were represented
by me, an expensive Junior at Newbridge. And as none of the family
counting-rooms and cotton-mills seemed to open the door for me--so
degenerate a scion of a money-making race as to have already an artist
behind him--I was glad to enter the wide portal of Cousin Lawrence’s
tobacco manufactory.

Here, as in most successful trades, you were, all but the very
heir-presumptive, put through a regular mill. First, a year or two in
the factory, just to get used to the sneezing; and then you took to
the road; and after a few years of this had thoroughly taught you the
retail trade, you were promoted to be a gentleman and hob-nob with the
planters in Cuba, and ride over their landed estates.

I got through the factory well enough; but the road, as you may fancy,
was a trial in prospect. When my time came (being then, as you will
see, something of a snob) I was careful to choose the wildest circuit,
most remote from Boston and from Boston ways. The extreme West--Denver,
Kansas City, Omaha--was out of the question; even the South--New
Orleans, Charleston, Florida particularly--was unsafe. Indiana was
barbarous enough, but went with Ohio and Michigan; and I finally
chose what was called the Tennessee Circuit, which included all the
country west of the Alleghanies, from the Ohio River to the Gulf
States. Louisville belonged to my Cincinnati colleague, but the rest of
Kentucky and Tennessee, from the Cumberland and Great Smoky Mountains
to the hills of Alabama and the plains of Memphis, were mine.

And by no means uninteresting I found it. I travelled, you must know,
in snuff; and the Southern mountains, with the headwaters of the
Western rivers, Cumberland, Alabama, Tennessee, are the country of the
snuff-taker in America.

The civilization, the picturesqueness of our country lies always
between the mountains and the seaboard. Trace the Appalachian summits
from their first uprearing at Tracadiegash or Gaspé, to that last
laurel-hill near Tupelo in Mississippi--on the left of you lies
history, character, local identity; on the right that great common
place, that vast central prairie, lying stolidly spread out between the
Rockies and the Blue Ridge, producing food. Heaven keep us above that
central plain, one would say, and from the men and moods and motives
that it breeds--but that out of it, in the very unidentified middle of
it, the Lord upreared a Lincoln.

However, my beat lay so well to the south of it, lurked so far up in
the mountain alleyways and southern river-cañons, that I found much
to study and more to see. The railway did little more than take me
to the field of labor; the saddle or the wagon or the country stage
must do the rest. My first trip was to the east of my dominions; my
headquarters were at Knoxville, and from there I rode through some
thousand miles of mountain and of cove; and different enough and remote
enough it was from all that I had known before, and from all that
might know me or look askance upon a travelling-merchant selling snuff
by sample. But this was but a breather, as it were; and on my second
journey I was ordered to replace my predecessor, Jerry Sullivan, at his
headquarters in Chattanooga, and take entire charge of that country.
Already I had contracted a prejudice for the slow and unconventional
modes of travelling; and after I had seen Jerry Sullivan, a genial
Irishman, and had formal delivery of his office, and he had gone back
with evident delight to his beloved New York, and I had sat there
alone a day or two, I thought that I would open out the business
westward. And looking at the map, it occurred to me that the Tennessee
River was the natural avenue to my domains in that direction. Luckily,
I made the acquaintance of a young land-prospector, with romantic
instincts like my own; and the second evening after this idea came
to me he and I were seated in a wooden dug-out canoe, my parcels of
samples and his instruments in the waist of the boat, drifting swiftly
down the brown stream at sunset, under the lofty shadow of the Lookout
Mountain.

The stream was shallow, and its waters so opaque that six inches
looked like six fathoms, and it happened not rarely that we ran upon a
sand-bar in full mid-stream; but a hard shove at the pole would send
us off, usually sideways, careening in the swirl. When we were not
aground our time was rapid--some six or seven miles an hour, with the
current, and the pole, and paddle. The mountains came close around us,
and the shores contracted; and pretty soon the railway took a plunge
into a tunnel and disappeared. No house nor light was in sight when
the moon came out. For some twenty miles or more we swung down the
swift stream silently, in a country that seemed quite unsettled. And
as the night made it still harder to make out the deeper places, it is
not surprising that after one long, gradual grate upon a mid-channel
sand-bank, we settled in a bed that all our efforts were insufficient
to dislodge us from. And Arthur Coe, my companion, by way of making
the best night of it possible, and the moon and the mild May weather
falling in, drew out a banjo from his traps in the bow and made
melodies not unpleasant to a man who lay silent in the stern, looking
at the stars and smoking his pipe.

A fine range of trees lined the opposite shore and, beyond, the forest
rolled up in mountain-shoulders to the sky; but not a sign of human
life was visible. So that we both started when, at the end of some
negro melody, the refrain was taken up by a lusty chorus, and rang far
out over the murmuring Tennessee. And in a few moments a large gum
canoe filled with joyous darkies came to us from the farther shore;
and finding our trouble, nothing would do but they must pull us
ashore and we spend the night with “Massa.” Which we did, and a kind
and queer old pair of gentry we found them, him and his wife, living
alone with a dozen of old freed slaves, some dozen miles from anywhere.
The old, wide, one-story plantation house stood in a clearing facing
the river (which used to be much more of a river, with many steamers
and cotton-craft, “befo’ de wo’”); and we had quite a concert before
we went to bed, with all the cigars and other accompaniment that we
needed. There were no young people in the house, only old massa and
missus and the old slaves; and we heard some story of death in battle
from the latter, as we all sang a hymn together before we went to bed,
and took one final glass of whiskey; and even the negroes were allowed
a taste of something, for wetting their whistles they had blown so well.

Thus it was, almost every night; and the long days were spent in
drifting down the river; and even Coe was in no hurry to get to the
place where he was to survey his railway or prospect his town; and
either the people were so lonely, or their good will was so great,
that they gave orders for snuff in a way that was surprising. Only
one thing struck us--the absence of young people; not only of young
men, but of girls. Coe said he thought the people were too old to have
any children; but what had become of the children they should have had
twenty years ago? “War-time,” said Coe, as if that explained it.

So we got down into Georgia, and then into Northern Alabama; and the
river wound so that we were two weeks on the way. Coe was to prospect
near a town called Florence, or Tuscumbia; places that then we never
had heard of.

That day, at dawn, we ran on Muscle Shoals. Fresh from a night under
the wild-grape vines, blossoming fragrantly, with a sweetness troubling
to the spirit, acrid, whereunder we had slept like one drugged with
wine--we had got into our canoe at sunrise or before, and pushed out
into the stream. It lay broad and still and shimmering--so broad that
we ought to have noticed its two or three miles of surface could scarce
cover but three or four inches of depth. But our eyelids were heavy
with the wild grape--as if its breath had been some soul phantasm of
what was to be its fruit--and so we paddled dreamily to the midstream
and ran aground.

“I say!” said Coe. But there was nothing to be said, and there we hung,
two miles from either shore, and the sun rose full up stream, and
gilded us.

In all that inland lake was but a hand’s-depth of water, flowing swift
and softly over sand and shells. We took to our poles; hard choosing
it would be which way lay deepest; and, one at either end, “Now then!”
from Coe; and we moved, or didn’t move, or for the most part spun
around upon the grinding shells, and Coe fell out of the boat and
splashed shallowly upon his back upon the sand.

So all that day we labored; and the sun grew hot, so that Coe at noon
sought wading for the shore to some shelter in the wild grapes; but
that, half a stone’s-throw from the white clay bank ran swiftly some
two fathoms deep of river Tennessee. So he came back and swore, and I
laughed; and we set at it again. Meantime the slow, deep-laden scows,
each with an appetizing tent for shade, spun downward close under that
vine-shaded bank and jeered at us.

Late in the afternoon, raw-handed from the poles and raw in visage
from a straight-down sun, we got away. Still breathless, burning, we
too swung down the smooth stream, narrower, though still a half-mile
wide; here it ran in curves by bold cliff-points castellated into
white, vine-garlanded turrets of the strangely worn and carven
limestone. No Rhine could be so beautiful; for here all was unprofaned,
silent, houseless, lined by neither road nor rail.

The sun was nearly setting, and Coe’s soul turned to beauty, and again
he began to marvel at the want of womankind. No country was visible
behind the river-banks; and he stood up and studied carefully the shore
through his field-glass.

“I think this is the spot,” he said.

“Tuscumbia?” said I. But Coe was rapt in study of the river-bank.

“Do you see her?” said I, louder.

Suddenly Coe turned to me in some excitement. “Paddle hard--I think
it’s the place.” And seizing his bow paddle he drove it into the
stream so deep that had I not steadied the craft she had rolled over.
Englishmen can never get used to inanimate objects; deft is not their
word.

So we rounded, always approaching the shore, a bold promontory; in four
successive terraces three hundred feet of ranged limestone towers rose
loftily, adorned with moss, and vines, and myrtle-ivy, their bases
veiled in a grand row of gum-trees lining the shore. No Rheinstein ever
was finer, and as we turned one point, a beautiful rich-foliaged ravine
came down to meet us, widening at the river to a little park of green
and wild flowers, walled on both sides by the castled cliffs; in the
centre the most unsullied spring I have ever seen. And all about, no
sign of man; no house, or smoke, or road, or track, or trail.

“This is it,” said Coe again, as the canoe grated softly on the
dazzling sand, and he prepared to leap ashore.

“What,” said I, “Tuscumbia?” For there is a legend of this place; and
of Tuscumbia, the great chieftain, and the Indian maiden, and their
trysting by the silent spring.

“No,” said he; “Sheffield. That gorge is the only easy grade to the
river for many miles. Through it we shall put our railroad, and this
flat will do for terminal facilities--eh!” and he leaped clumsily; for
the loud report of a shot-gun broke the air and the charge whisked
almost about our ears, and flashed a hundred yards behind us in the
Tennessee.

With one accord we ran up the ravine. There was no path, and the heavy
vines and briers twined about our legs, and the tree-trunks of the
Middle Ages still lay greenly, but when we sought to clamber over them,
collapsed and let us to their punky middles.

Suddenly, as we rounded a bend between two gloomy ravages of rock,
there stood before us a young girl, in the green light--her hair as
black as I had ever seen, with such a face of white and rose! I stared
at her helplessly; Coe, I think, cowered behind me. She looked at us
inquiringly a moment; and then, as we neither spoke, turned up the side
of the ravine, with her fowling-piece, and vanished by some way unknown
to us. I would have followed her, I think, but Coe held me back by the
coat-tails.

“Don’t,” said he. “She’s quite welcome to a shot, I am sure.”




2.


NEVERTHELESS, after this one moment of chivalrous impulse,
Coe set up his levelling-machine and began taking the gradients of the
ravine up which this girl had gone. I have never known an Englishman
upon whose heart you could make any impression until his stomach was
provided for. Meantime I wandered on, admiring the red hibiscus blossom
and liana vine that veiled the gorge in tropical luxuriance up to the
myrtles of the limestone. Finally I emerged upon the plateau above the
river, and found myself in a glorious, green, flowing prairie, many
miles broad and apparently as long as the brown Tennessee that lay hid
behind me. In the midst of it one iron-furnace was already in blast.

The inn (the International Hotel) at Tuscumbia was very noisy. I was
struck by this when I went to my room to dress for supper; I had only
been able to get one room for myself and Coe; there were two beds in
it, but only one wash-stand. Through the walls, which were very thin,
I could hear at least four distinct feminine voices on the one side,
and several upon the other. There were also some across the hall that
seemed to be engaged in the same conversation; and that the speakers
were young ladies I had fleeting but satisfactory evidence when I
opened my door to set out my water-jug for a further supply.

“Look here, young man,” said the landlord to me, when I again
endeavored to get another room for Coe. “How many rooms do you reckon
this yer house’ll hold, with fifty-seven guests all wantin’ em?”

“Fifty-seven!” said I. The International Hotel was a small two-story
wooden house with a portico. “How many can the hotel accommodate?”

“Thirty in winter,” said the landlord. “In summer sixty to seventy.”

I stared at the man until he explained.

“You see, in the winter, they’s most from the North. I hev accommodated
seventy-four,” added he, meditatively; “but they wuz _all_
Southerners, an’ that wuz befo’ the wo’. They took a good bar’l of
whiskey a day, they did--an’ consid’able Bo’bon,” and he ended with a
sigh.

“Your present visitors seem chiefly young ladies,” I hazarded.

“Hevn’t you heard?” and mine host looked at me as if to reassure
himself as to my social position. “They is society folks from
Knoxville--down here givin’ a play--‘The Pirates of Penzance,’”
and he handed me a newspaper wherein he pointed to a double-leaded
announcement setting forth that the well-known Amateur Shakespeare
Comedy Club of Knoxville, consisting of ladies and gentlemen of the
upper social circles of that city, would appear in this well-known
opera, the article closing with a tribute to the personal charms of
Miss Birdie McClung, the principal member of the company.

“They hev come down in a Pullman cyar, all to themselves, quite
special,” said the innkeeper.

“Are any of them married, Colonel Kipperson?” said I, timidly.

The colonel looked at me with scorn; and just then a peal of rippling
laughter, melodious as the waves of the Tennessee upon Muscle Shoals,
rang through the thin partition, accompanied by the crash of some
falling missile, I think, a hair-brush.

“Does that look as if they wuz married?” said he, and turned upon his
heel, as one who gave me up at last. “Supper’s at six,” he added,
relenting, at the door.

Coe turned up at supper, but we saw nothing of the fair actresses; and
the evening we passed socially with the leading spirits of the hotel:
Judge Hankinson, Colonel Wilkinson, General McBride, Tim Healy, the
railroad contractor, and two or three black bottles. Colonel Wilkinson
and General McBride had been trying a case before Judge Hankinson, and
both were disposed to criticise the latter’s rulings, but amiably, as
became gentlemen over a whiskey-bottle in the evening. At midnight,
just as the judge was ordering a fourth bottle, the door opened, and
in walked a very beautiful young woman with black hair and eyes.
“Good-evening, Miss Juliet,” said the others, as we rose and bowed.

Miss Juliet walked up to the judge, who with difficulty got up, and
followed her out of the room. “Good-night, jedge,” and in the pause
that followed, General McBride remarked pathetically that “the jedge
wasn’t what he used to wuz.”

“No,” said the colonel, with a sigh, “I’ve seen the time when he
wouldn’t leave a third bottle of his own.”

“What relation is Miss Juliet to Judge Wilkinson?” asked Coe.

The general and the colonel started; and Tim Healy looked
apprehensively at the door.

“Young man,” said the general, “I wouldn’t ask that question, if I wuz
you.”

“The jedge ken still shoot,” added the colonel.

All was forgiven when I had explained that Mr. Coe was an Englishman;
and we went to bed. About two in the morning the adjoining rooms became
suddenly populous with soft voices. Coe started to his elbow in his cot
and called to me. “It’s only the Amateur Shakespeare Comedy Club of
Knoxville, returning from the play,” said I; and I dropped asleep and
dreamed confusedly of Tuscumbia, the Indian chieftain, feminine voices,
and the rippling waters of the Tennessee.

In the morning I got into the train for Chattanooga, leaving Coe
behind. On the platform I noticed two graceful girls, dressed in white
muslin, wide straw hats with white satin ribbon and sashes, white lace
mitts, and thick white veils; not so thick that I could not see that
they were brunettes, with hair as black as only grows under Southern
nights. The train was composed of two cars--the ordinary Southern
local--differing from a Jersey accommodation only in that it had still
more peanut shells and an added touch of emigrant-train and circus. At
one end sat a tall gentleman in a stovepipe hat, who had removed his
boots, and was taking his ease in blue woollen stockings. At the other
was a poor, pretty woman, with large, sad eyes, petting her emaciated
husband, who was dying of consumption. Just as the train started,
he had a terrible fit of coughing; now he leans his head upon her
shoulder, and she rests her cheek upon his forehead. Behind me, but
across the aisle, are the two young ladies in white muslin.

So we jangle on through the hot Southern June morning; and pretty soon
one of the girls in white comes over and takes the seat behind me. She
has thrown off her veil, and I assure you a more beautiful face I never
saw; it’s all very well to talk of a neck like a lily and cheeks like a
rose, and eyes

  “Whose depths unravel the coiled night
  And see the stars at noon----”

but when you really see them you fall down and worship the aggregation
whose inventoried details, in any novel, would excite weariness.
Meantime, her sister had stretched herself out upon the other seat,
pointing one dainty russet leather foot beneath the muslin, and
disposed her handkerchief across her eyes.

How to speak to this fair beauty so close behind me I know not; I can
almost feel her eyes in the back of my head; so near that I dare not
look round; I fear she may be another daughter of Judge Wilkinson’s.
And the train jangles on, and we are winding through green dense
forests, up to the mountains. I wait half an hour for propriety,
and then look around; I catch her deep eyes full, “bows on,” as it
were, her lips parted as if almost to speak, and I--shrink back in
confusion. I hear her give a little sound, whether a sigh or a murmur
I am not sure; but pretty soon I hear her struggling with her window.
This is my chance; and I rise and with the politest bow I know and
“permit me,” I seek to help her; but the sash is old and grimed and
the angle inconvenient. Finally I have to go around into her seat; and
leaning over her I get a purchase and the window goes up with a bang
and a cloud of dust that sets us both sneezing. “It is very hot,” I
say, standing with my hand upon her seat, irresolute.

“Do you know, I thought you were never going to speak?” she says.

I sit down on the seat beside her.

“I hate being unsociable in a railway journey; but, of course, I
couldn’t speak first. And now there’s so little time left,” she adds,
regretfully.

“Where are you going--not to Chattanooga?”

“Only to Scott’s Plains. What’s your name?”

“Horatio Higginbotham,” I have to reply, fearing she will laugh, though
the name is well known in Salem. She does not laugh at all, but smiles
divinely.

“My name is Jeanie Bruce. And that’s my sister May. Come over, and I’ll
introduce you.”

We walk across the car and Miss Jeanie says to Miss May (who, it
appears, is not asleep), “May, I want to introduce to you my friend,
Mr. Higginbotham. Mr. Higginbotham, Miss May Bruce.”

I bow to the more languid beauty, who does not rise, but smiles a twin
sister of Miss Jeanie’s smile, showing her little white teeth and
tapping her little foot in a way to make a man distracted which to look
at.

“I thought you didn’t seem to be getting on very well,” says the
recumbent May, “but now, I suppose, I can go to sleep,” and she pulls
the lace handkerchief back over her eyes, and Jeanie leads me (it is
the word) back to our seat on the other side of the car. “We are twin
sisters; and some people can’t tell one from the other. Could you?” And
she takes off her hat, pushes the soft black mass back from her brow,
and looks at me, frankly, sweetly.

“I shouldn’t want to,” I say. I think I am getting on; but she looks
at me as if puzzled, half displeased.

“May is engaged,” she answers, “and I am not. I have been, though.”

“Dear me,” I answer, heedlessly; “how old----”

“Seventeen. But I never had a gen’leman ask me such a question before.”

She is silent; I speechless. Yet I wish she would pronounce the t in
“gentleman.” She does not bear malice long, but asks “where I come
from?”

“Boston,” I say; “and _I_ am twenty-three.”

She laughs merrily, in forgiveness, with a dear, lovable, quick sense
of humor. Then she scans me curiously. “I never saw a gen’leman from
Boston before.”

“There are some there,” I answer, humbly.

“Of course we see plenty of commercial travellers,” she says, and the
conversation languishes. I look out the window, for suggestions, at the
tall mountain timber and the bearded gray moss. It suggests nothing but
partridges.

“But you have not yet told me whether you can tell us apart.”

Thus challenged, I bring my eyes to hers; there is something dazzling
about them that always makes it hard to see her face, except when she
is looking away; my eyes wander not from hers, until she does look
away--out the window--and I suddenly see something familiar in the face.

“Is there much shooting about here?” I ask, abruptly, meaning game.

“Yes, there is a terrible deal. Why, my cousin, Kirk Bruce, was only
eighteen when he shot and killed another gen’leman at school.”

“Dear me, I didn’t mean men,” I say. “I meant quail and partridges. And
I thought I had seen you yesterday with a shot-gun down in that green
bottom by the Tennessee. It might have been men, though; for your shot
whistled about the ears of my friend, Mr. Coe.”

“I wondered you didn’t remember me when you got upon the train,”
answers Jeanie. “Where is Mr. Coe?”

“He stayed behind at Sheffield,” I say. “Do you belong to the ‘Pirates
of Penzance’?”

“Mercy, no--they’re city people from Knoxville--we’ve only spent two
winters there getting our education in music.”

“Is Knoxville a musical city?”

“The advantages there are considered exceptional. We were at the
Convent of Sacré-Cœur.”

“At the convent?” I ask.

“All our best schools are the convents, you know, for us girls. At
Sacré-Cœur we have instruction from Signor Mancini. I have learned
seventeen pieces, but May knows twenty-four and two duets.”

“Sonatas?” I say. “Concertos? Chopin? Beethoven?”

Miss Bruce shakes her head. “No,” she answers, with some pride. “Our
music is _all_ operatic. Of course, I can play ‘The Monastery
Bells’ and ‘The Shepherd’s Dream;’ but now I’m learning ‘Il Trovatore.’
My sister can play a concert-piece upon ‘La Cenerentola.’”

“What else do you learn?”

“French--and dancing--and embroidery. But I suppose you are terribly
learned,” and Miss Jeanie takes a wide and searching gaze of my poor
countenance with her beautiful soft eyes.

“Not at all. I am a commercial traveller,” I say to justify my blushes.
It was malicious of me; for she looks pained.

“Nearly all _our_ young gen’lemen have got to go into business
since the war. My cousin Bruce----”

(There was an inimitable condescension in her accent of the “our.”)

“The one who shot the other boy at school? Don’t you think you have too
much of that kind of shooting?”

“As a gen’leman he had to do it--in self-defence. Of course, they were
both very _young_ gen’lemen. The other gen’leman had his revolver
out first.”

“You ought not to carry revolvers so much.”

“There! that’s just what I’ve often said. But how can you help it?”

“I help it.”

“You don’t say you haven’t so much as a pistol with you?” And her
gentle eyes are so full open that in looking into them I forget my
answer.

“Well, anyhow, it wasn’t Cousin Kirk’s fault. He didn’t have any
revolver, either, when he first went out of the house; but another
scholar he ran up and made him take one. Mother didn’t ever want him
to go to that school, anyhow; several of our family had got shot there
before by this other boy’s family. This other boy, you see, liked a
young lady Cousin Kirk was attentive to; and he sent word in to him one
day to come out of the school-house to see him. And the other young
gen’lemen in the school, they warned Cousin Kirk not to see him, as he
wasn’t armed. He’d never ought to have gone out unarmed. But he went.
And as soon as they met he shot Cousin Bruce in the right arm. And a
friend that was with him gave Cousin Bruce his pistol; and he had to
fire; and he killed him; and Cousin Bruce always says that man’s face
haunts him yet. And the mother of the young man was almost crazy; and
afterward she called at the school with a revolver, dressed in deep
mourning. And when Cousin Bruce came into the parlor he didn’t know who
she was; and she shot at him through the crape veil. But, of course,
she didn’t hit him. And Cousin Bruce always says that man’s face haunts
him yet.”

(I have endeavored to set down this conversation just as it happened.
At the time I did not know at all what to make of Miss Jeanie Bruce. I
had seen no girls like her in Salem, or even Boston. Her English was
poor, her education deficient, her manners free. On all these points
she was about on a par with the shop-girls in Lynn. But she was not at
all like a Lynn shop-girl. Had I supposed it possible for there to be
any ladies except according to the Salem and Boston standards, I should
have set her down for a lady at the time.)

Here we arrived at Decatur, where I had the pleasure of taking the two
Misses Bruce in to dinner, in a hotel built alongside of the railroad
track, as the principal street of the town. In the long dining-room
were six transverse tables, over everyone of which was a huge wooden
fan like the blade of a paddle. The six fans were connected together,
and at the back of the room a small bare-footed negro swung the entire
outfit to and fro by means of a long pole like a boat-hook; and with
a great swish! swish! disturbed in regular oscillations the clouds
of flies. Miss Jeanie took off the lace mitts at the dinner-table,
and upon one forefinger of her pretty white hand I noticed a ring--a
single band of gold setting a small ruby.

When we got back into the cars and May had gone to sleep again, I
reproached Jeanie with telling me she was not engaged. “I, too, was
going to spend this winter at Knoxville, and I had hoped to see
something of you.”

“I am not engaged,” said Miss Jeanie. “The ring was given me by a
gen’leman, but I do not care for him at all. I only promised to wear it
a few weeks, because he bothered so. I’ll tell you what,” she said, “to
show I don’t care for him and remind you to be sure and call, I’ll give
it to you.”

I was in some surprise, you may suppose. “But I can’t take a
gentleman’s ring----”

“It’s my ring, I tell you,” said Miss Jeanie. “And if you don’t take
it, I shan’t believe you’re coming to see me, and I won’t give you my
address--there!”

What could I do? I took the ring.

When I got that night to Knoxville, I wrote at once to Jerry Sullivan.
If they had spent two winters in Knoxville, he might have met them,
or, at least, known something about them.

                                             “KNOXVILLE, June 30, 188--
  “DEAR JERRY: Tell me all you know about Miss Jeanie Bruce.
                                             “Yours,
                                                  “H. HIGGINBOTHAM.”

To which the answer came by telegram:

  “H. HIGGINBOTHAM, Knoxville:
  “It would take too long.
                                                  “SULLIVAN.”




3.


I HAD deferred my call upon Miss Bruce until I should receive
Sullivan’s answer to my letter; but when his telegram came I was in
a quandary. It struck me as ambiguous. And what could be the extreme
haste that made a telegram advisable? Or, perhaps, was the whole thing
only one of Jerry Sullivan’s jokes?

Meantime I was wearing Miss Jeanie Bruce’s ring. Once it struck me
that if I did not mean to call upon her, I ought to send it back. But
I did mean to call upon her. There never was any question about that,
from the first. I did not in the least approve of her, but I meant to
call upon her, if only to tell her so. Her conversation had revealed a
certain indifference to human life, but she had very soft and gentle
eyes. Like the face of the boy whom Cousin Kirk had shot, they “haunted
me yet.”

Coe noticed my ring. Oddly enough, though a foreigner, he had got into
the ways of the people quicker than I had; and I saw him looking at it
one day, though he said nothing. That is, nothing of the ring; he did
ask me whether I had been to see Miss Bruce. So I went; they boarded in
a small frame house that belonged to a Mrs. Judge Pennoyer. I suspect
it was this female justice who came to the door; it was a Monday
afternoon and the house was odorous with soup; but Miss Jeanie was
“very much engaged.” The Friday following she was out, and Wednesday I
met her walking on the principal street of Knoxville with a tall young
man.

“Try Saturday,” said Coe that evening. “I want you to ask those girls
for my trip up over the line.” During the summer, Coe had got some
rusty rails spiked upon his right of way; and now wished to invite the
youths and ladies of Tennessee to run over them in a trial trip.

That day I found Miss Jeanie alone in the parlor, almost as if awaiting
me. “I began to think you had forgotten us,” said she, softly. Dear me,
how soft her eyes were! I said that I had called there many times.

“You could scarcely expect me to let you in when another gen’leman was
here!” said she. “Especially when----” I saw her look at the ring; but
she checked herself. My afternoon calls in Salem had not so exclusively
monopolized the lady’s attention, and I looked at her, puzzled. Just
then the front door-bell rang; and I was confident I heard Mrs. Judge
Pennoyer tell someone that Miss Jeanie “was very much engaged.”

My conversation languished. I think that Miss Bruce was disappointed.
“Shall I play to you?” I saw her hesitate between “The Shepherd Boy”
and a romance of Brinley Richards; and I hastened to reply, “I would
rather talk.”-- “But you don’t talk,” cried she. “But I look.”-- “You
can look while I play.”-- “Not so well,” said I.-- “I have a new
piece--one they sent me from the convent, the Sacré-Cœur, you know,
where I was for some years. It is called the ‘Tears of Love.’ The
musical instruction of the convent was very good. Sister Ignatia had
studied in Italy. I suppose it was better than outside--don’t you?”

I had never studied in a convent, and I don’t think I made much answer,
for she went on. “Of course, you know, it is pleasanter in other ways.
One has so much more liberty. Yet the most Kentucky ladies are all
educated in convents. But I felt that I wished to see more of society.
At the Sacré-Cœur they do not allow you to receive your gen’lemen
friends except in the presence of the mother superior.”

There was a freshness, a simplicity of method in this young lady’s
playing with the boys that quite took my breath away, and to relieve
the situation I deemed it best to submit to the “Tears of Love.”
Of this piece of music I remember little, save that the composer
was continually bringing the left hand over the right to execute
unnecessary arpeggios in the treble notes. Jeanie’s girlish figure was
so round, and swayed so easily, that I thought this part of the music
very pretty.

Then I bethought myself of the object of my visit; and I invited Miss
Jeanie and Miss May, on Mr. Coe’s behalf, to make the railroad trip. A
Salem instinct made me include Mrs. Judge Pennoyer; I then saw in Miss
Bruce’s look that it had been unnecessary. Only when I got out the door
did I remember that the ring had, after all, been my main object; to
return it, I mean.

On the other side of the street, along by a low white-painted paling,
lowered a heavy, hulking fellow in a rusty black frock-coat, a
great deal of white shirt, and a black clerical tie. In this garb
I recognized the Southern University man, and in the man I had a
premonition I saw the redoubtable “Cousin Kirk.”




4.


COE was chartered by the sovereign States of Florida and
Alabama to construct his line “from that part of the Atlantic Ocean
called the Gulf of Mexico, in the former State,” to a point “at or
near” the Tennessee River in the latter. And so “a point at or near the
Tennessee River” was the first object of our journey, and this proved
as definite a designation as we could give it; though it had public
parks and corner lots and a name--on paper. Its name in reality was
“Cat Island,” the only native settlement being on a beautifully wooded
island thus called, midstream in the river.

“Wouldn’t do to call it that, you know,” said Coe, in a burst of
frankness. “Famous place for chills and fever; everybody born on Cat
Island, white or black, turns clay-color! So we thought of Bagdad--from
its resemblance to the Euphrates.”

Mrs. Judge Pennoyer had come; but so had a strange young man whose name
I found was Raoul. He devoted himself to Miss May with a simplicity
of purpose amazing to a Northern mind. Hardly anyone knew of the
expedition at Knoxville, but when we arrived at Bagdad, that spacious
plain was peopled in a way to delight the speculator. “Who are they?”
I asked of Coe, puzzled at his evident anxiety where I expected pride.
“Who are they, O Caliph of Bagdad?”

“Who are they? The Mesopotamians. Dash it,” he added, “they’ve come,
with their wives and children, for the trip.”

So, indeed, they had. Tim Healy met us as we alighted on the platform
of the old railroad station--there was, indeed, a platform, but nothing
more--and grasping Coe and me warmly by the hand, said rapidly, in
the latter’s ear, “had to invite a few of them, you know--prominent
gen’lemen of the neighborhood--valuable political influence”--and then,
aloud, “General McBride, gen’lemen. Mrs. McBride. Judge Hankinson I
think you know. Mr. Coe, I want you fo’ to know Senator Langworthy; one
of our most prominent citizens, gen’lemen, an’ I had the grea-at-est
difficulty in persuading the senator fo’ to come along. I told him,
Mr. Coe, we could show him something of a railroad already----” Coe
expressed his acknowledgments.

“Sir, it was a pleasure to study the developments of my country. It
does not need to be a citizen of Bagdad to appreciate the advantages
of your location,” and the senator waved his hand in the direction
of a rusty line of track I then first perceived winding across the
prairie from the Tennessee. “Let me introduce to you Mrs. Langworthy.”
A pale lady, with bonnet-strings untied and a baby at the breast, was
indicated by the second gesture; she looked worn and world-weary, but
I lived to learn she had an endurance of hardship Stanley might have
envied, and a relish for fried cakes and bacon in the small hours of
night that I am sure only an optimist could feel. “My partner, Mr.
Hanks. My wife’s sister, Miss McClung.”

By this time we were ready to start. A brand-new locomotive decorated
with flowers had backed down awkwardly from the new-laid track to the
junction; and we entered what Coe with some pride informed me was the
directors’ car. It contained one long saloon, two staterooms, a minute
kitchen, and a glass gallery behind.

It was amazing how we all got into it; and when we had, I counted
three babies, seven old women, and a dog, besides some twenty men.
All had brought their luncheon-baskets, and the babies (except that
appertaining unto Mrs. Senator Langworthy) were consoled with bottles.
After a prodigious deal of whistling, we were off, and Bagdad resumed
its quietude--at least, we thought so; but even then a distant shouting
was heard, and Colonel Wilkinson, his wife, and two urchin boys were
descried, hastening down the track from the direction of the Bagdad
Hotel. Judge Hankinson pulled the bell-cord and then thrust his head
out of a window and roared to the engineer. “Stop, driver, it’s Colonel
Wilkinson. How are you, colonel?” he added to that gentleman, who had
arrived, and was mopping himself with a red silk handkerchief, his wife
and offspring still some laps behind. “Almost thought you’d be left.”

“Great heavens, I wish he was!” groaned Coe in my ear.

“Never mind, the judge hasn’t brought Miss Julia,” said Tim Healy; and
this time we were really off.

I have neither time nor memory to describe that day; though it was very
funny while it lasted, perhaps all the funnier that there was no one to
share the humor of it. Everybody was great on the development of the
country, and everybody made speeches. We stopped at least twenty times
in the first fifteen miles to look at a seam of coal, or a field of
iron, or a marble quarry (suitable for the Alhambra Palace or the new
State Capitol, sir), or, at least, one of the most wonderful mineral
springs of the world--only waiting the completion of Colonel Coe’s
line of railroad to become another Saratoga. At all these places we
got off the train, and went in a long, straggling, irregular file to
inspect, Mrs. Senator Langworthy ruthlessly interrupting the repast of
her youngest-born at such moments, and leaving him upon a car-seat in
charge of the fireman. At the quarry or mineral spring the proprietor
would take his turn in making a little stump speech, standing on the
edge and gesticulating into the pool, while the rest of us stood
grouped around the margin. Meantime Miss May Bruce and Raoul would go
to walk in the woods; and we would hear the engine whistling wildly
for us to return. It was a novel interruption to a flirtation, that
railway-whistle; but everybody looked upon us amiably as we hurried
down to the track; live and let live, and take your time for happiness;
no schedule time, as at Salem.

By the hot noon we were above the river valley and winding up the folds
of fir-forest that clothed the shaggy shoulders of the mountain. Engine
No. 100 puffed and strained, and reeled up before us like a drunken
man. We had had our dinner; the sexes began to separate, and even the
Langworthy baby went to sleep. Raoul and May were riding on the engine.
I left Miss Jeanie Bruce and joined the gentlemen, who were sitting
cross-legged and contented in the smoking end of the car, from the
glass-housed platform of which we looked already back upon the great
central plain from the rising Appalachians.

“Oh, it’s a glorious country,” said “Colonel” Coe; and, I think, winked
at me.

“Why, senator,” said the judge, “I have seen a corner-lot sold at
Bagdad six times in one day, ’n a thousan’ dollars higher every time.”

“General,” said the senator, “do you know what the original purchase
of the Bagdad Land and Investment Company aggregated--for the whole
eighteen hundred acres?”

There was a silence. Everybody looked at me. It dawned upon me that I
was the “general,” and I wondered why I ranked poor Coe.

“I’ve no idea,” I hastened to add; fearing the senator had followed
Coe’s wink.

“Thirty thousand dollars,” answered General McBride, as if it were a
game of “School-teacher.” “And they sold three hundred acres for----”

“Fifteen hundred thousand dollars,” resumed Judge Hankinson, with
intense solemnity.

“Paper?” said Tim Healy.

“Cash, Captain Healy,” said the judge, fiercely, “cash.”

“I want to know!--Was that the lot you bought of Widow Enraghty, judge?”

A roar of laughter greeted Tim’s answer. People tipped back their
chairs, slapping their thighs; the Langworthy baby woke up and cried,
and even the judge screwed up his whiskey-softened old face in vain.

“Tell us about it, judge,” said Raoul, who had come back from the
engine and was peering over our shoulders. “I’m a young lawyer, and I
want to know these tricks.”

“Young man,” said the judge, “I’ll _tell_ you, and let it be a
warning to you when you’re married, to be honest and say so” (Raoul
blushed violently). “The fact was, I had been acquainted with the widow
Enraghty more than fifty years--her husband had got killed in the
forties, an’ she was sixty-five if she was a day, and she owned that
valuable corner lot opposite the new Court-house and by the building
of the Board of Trade.” (“Not built yet,” whispered Coe to me.) “I’d
been dickering with her for weeks; but I stood at four thousand, and
she wanted five. Now I rode up that morning (it was a fine day; warm
and spring-like, and I felt rather sanguine) and I said, ‘What’s
your price, Mrs. Enraghty, to-day?’ ‘Six thousand,’ said she. This
raise made me kind o’ nervous, an’ I got rash. ‘I’ll give you three
thousand,’ said I, ‘cash.’ ‘Here’s your deed,’ says Widow Enraghty.
And I declare she had it all ready. I looked at it carefully; it seemed
all right, and I paid her the money. I kinder noticed there was a young
fellow sittin’ in the room. Well, sir!”

“Well, judge?” The judge’s manner grew impressive.

“Next week that young fellow--Bill Pepper he was, an’ he was just
twenty-one--he brought an ejectment against me. _She had married him
that morning._ So Bill Pepper kep’ the land, and Mrs. Pepper kep’
the money.”

In the laughter that followed I became conscious of Raoul pinching
my arm mysteriously. “I want a word with you in private,” said he.
“Would you mind coming out upon the cow-catcher? It’s been railed off
on purpose for observation,” he added, answering my look of amazement,
“and it’s a first-rate place to see the cobweb trestle from. It’s
something about the young ladies,” he added, seeing that I still
hesitated, “and there’s really no other place.”

I looked through the car, but perceived the ladies were sitting in
earnest conclave. On the front platform Mrs. Langworthy and the baby
were taking the air. In the cab of the engine were the two girls. I
suppose I made a gesture of assent, for Raoul nodded to the engineer,
who slowed to a halt that almost threw the Langworthy’s domestic group
into the bed of a brawling mountain stream some three hundred feet
below.

“These gen’lemen want to ride on the pilot,” shouted the engineer in
explanation; and we took our way to that exalted perch, where, sitting
cross-legged and with hands nervously gripping the rail, I listened to
Raoul’s story.

The Misses Bruce, he said, were wild not to go back that day with the
railroad party, but to drive to the end of the location through the
woods.

“Great Heavens!” said I, “but only Coe and I are going, with Captain
Healy. There is nothing but tents----”

“The ladies are used to camping out.”

“But it will be so rough--there are two thousand niggers in camp!”

“The ladies are not afraid.”

I certainly was; for just then, with a preliminary corkscrew-like
lurch, the engine began climbing the famous cobweb trestle; the earth
suddenly vanished beneath us and we looked down through a lath-like
tracery of wooden girders to the foaming stream, now four hundred feet
below. I heard a cry behind, and looking timidly around, I saw the pale
face of Jeanie at one engine-window and of May Bruce at the other.

“But--but there is no chaperone,” I gasped.

“Mrs. Judge Pennoyer has agreed to come,” answered Mr. Raoul, sweetly.




5.


THE end of our journey lay upon the very summit of the mountain
ridge; twenty leagues of forest all around. Here, with the
sweep of his gesture to the westering sun, Judge Hankinson made the
great speech of the day. I remember little about it save that he
likened Coe to Icarus, referred to me (General Higginbotham) as one of
the merchant princes of the Orient, and to Tim Healy as some mighty
magician “spinning his iron spell o’er mountain and o’er sea.” The
rusty iron rails stopped abruptly in a field of stumps; beyond and
below us stretched “the right of way.” Only a broad swath cut through
the forest, the trees heaped where they fell, like jack-straws. At the
edge of the clearing stood a three-seated wagon and a pair of mules.

Everyone took very simply to the proposition that we were not
returning; and after all the speech-making was over and all the
whiskey drunk, the train, with prolonged and reiterated tooting, began
backing slowly down the mountain toward civilization again.

“Isn’t this delightful?” said Miss Jeanie. Tim Healy sniffed.

I had made it all right with Coe; but Healy still looked at the
proceeding askance.

“Last time I rode through this yer wood I had the pay-chest with me;
and two bullets went through my hat. And last week they killed the
United States mail and Jim, the storekeeper of Section Fourteen.”

I considered this to be a story for tender-feet, so I mildly hinted
that “they” would not attack so large a party.

“Won’t they, though? The only double mule team as ever goes through yer
is the month’s pay, an’ hit’s jest due this Saturday.”

“Who is ‘they’?” said I.

“Moonshiners. But they’re all on ’em up to it. Hope you’ve got your
shooters?”

By this time we had started, and were driving through the twilight
of the forest over a trail hardly perceptible where the wood grew
scantier.

“Not I,” said I, “I never carry them.”

“Nor I,” said Coe, “I left ’em on the bureau at home.”

“All right,” said Tim, gloomily. “But most fellers like a shot of their
own afore they turn their toes up.”

Miss Jeanie produced a small, pearl-handled, silver-mounted revolver,
and begged me to borrow it. Miss May handed the mate of it to Coe; and
young Raoul displayed a formidable pair of Smith & Wesson’s, where he
was sitting with her on the back seat.

“All right,” said Tim, somewhat mollified. “But the wood’s chock full
of chickers all the same.”

At this the ladies appeared really so terrified that I asked what
“chickers” were, and discovered them to be a kind of insect.

“I’ve got my pennyr’yle,” said Mrs. Judge Pennoyer, who was a woman of
resource.

What a drive it was! We lost our way; and the girls sang. Tim swore,
Mrs. Judge Pennoyer laughed, and May and Jeanie sang all the sweeter.
Tim Healy thought he saw twenty moonshiners and emptied his revolver
at one of them; a charred stump it proved to be. We passed one hut in
a clearing, and were refreshed by veritable whiskey; _i.e._,
“pine-top” whiskey, milky-white in color, and said to be made out of
the cones of pines. We found the trail once more and the stars came
out, and the nightingales sang, and May Bruce and young Raoul became
more silent. At last we saw, upon a hillside in the forest, the burning
pitch-pine torches of the great construction “camp.” Hundreds of black
forms surrounded these ruddy fires; from some of the groups came sounds
of banjos and negroes singing; and I looked suddenly up and saw the
starlight reflected in Miss Jeanie’s eyes.

There was only one tent in the camp with “sides” to it--_i.e._,
perpendicular flaps making walls below the roof, and that, of course,
was sacred to the ladies. We lay beneath a mere =V=-shaped canvas
roof, which was stretched downward so as to end some three feet from
the ground, our heads in a heap of pillows, and our legs all radiating
outward, like a starfish, to terminate in thirty booted feet. Under the
canvas back I could see the starlight, and there I lay awake some time
regarding it, which now seemed to bear some reflection of Miss Jeanie’s
eyes. Next thing came the sun and opened mine by shining into them;
then closed them up again, and I rolled into the canvas-shade, and up,
and out of doors, and followed Coe and Healy to the “branch” below. Big
Bear Creek it was, of a rich red-chocolate color, fit, perhaps, to wash
a Chinaman who could not see. Yet Coe took a plunge, and looked up,
white enough.

“Come in,” he shouted to us, who were hesitating, “it doesn’t come off.”

The negroes had been sleeping all over the place, tentless; and now
they were pulling themselves together, in groups, and starting for
the railroad, or rather where the railroad was to be. On the way they
stopped at the commissaries’ to get their breakfast, standing in long
rows before the counter, waiting their turn. The commissaries’ stores
were the only wooden buildings in camp; well walled and bolted, too, as
they had to be, said Tim Healy, to withstand the attacks of a riotous
Saturday night. Four men, he said, were always in them armed; and on
Saturday nights, pay-night, they would often empty a revolver or two
into the crowd and perhaps “drop” a nigger, before it ceased to besiege
their doors for fruit or whiskey.

Then we all went to breakfast, the Misses Bruce both fresh as dewy
wood-flowers, and Mrs. Judge Pennoyer radiating amiability. Only the
head commissary and the section contractor were thought of sufficient
social importance to breakfast with us, and the former from his stores
brought many delicacies in cans and bottles. Then after breakfast we
went to walk--the ladies with sunshades and gloves--upon the location;
a broad swath cut through the rolling forest and undulating far as the
eye could reach in either direction, dotted with men and mules. Ahead,
they were still blowing out stumps with gunpowder and dragging them
away; where we stood was being built an embankment of gravel; and they
were dragging out gravel from the “cut” ahead and heaping it upon the
long mound. I gave my hand to Miss Jeanie and helped her up. Each black
negro worked with a splendid mule; seventeen or eighteen hands high
perhaps, dragging a curious sort of drag-spade, which the mule knew
how to catch in the gravel, turn out full, drag the load evenly along,
and then tip it out adroitly at the precise spot, a foot in front of
the last dump; the negro hardly doing more than standing by to see
the mule kept working; not, of course, working himself. Thus each
man-laborer became an overseer, if only to a mule.

“The mule’s the finer animal of the two,” said Coe, “and much the more
moral.”

“But he’s got no vote,” grunted Jim. “Ef we didn’t keep them black
Mississippi niggers up here off’m the farms, they’d swamp us all.”

“Are they allowed to bring their wives to camp with them?” queried Miss
Jeanie, softly; and, following her glance, we saw several coal-black
damsels sitting in the warm sand-bank at the side of the cut, their
finery about them, and evidently established there for the morning,
basking in the sun.

“Oh, yes, they bring up their wives,” said Healy, reluctantly. “If we
didn’t, they’d run away every two or three days. Nothing a contractor
dislikes so much as irregular labor.”

“But it shows they have some good in them to be so devoted,” said Miss
Jeanie.

“We don’t all of us have emotions stronger than money-getting,” added I.

“I don’t know about emotions,” said Tim. “There’s forty of their
wives and eighteen hundred niggers, and every Saturday night they
has a fight an’ a batch on ’em gets killed, an’ I know it’s terrible
expensive on labor. Most as bad as moonshine.”

“Have you got King Kelly, yet?” said Coe, in an undertone.

“Hush!” hissed Captain Healy, dramatically. Just then I noticed a file
of peculiarly idle negroes sauntering down the “right of way;” they had
passed us once or twice before, and appeared to have no occupation.
“See anythin’ peculiar about them niggers?”

“They are very lazy,” said Coe.

“They look like minstrels,” said Miss Jeanie.

“By gracious!” cried Healy, slapping his thigh, “if she hasn’t hit it!”
We looked at him inquiringly; he dropped his voice to a stage whisper.
“Come up here,” and he started, dragging Mrs. Judge Pennoyer by one
hand up the new gravel slope beside the line. Raoul followed, with Miss
May; he had been very silent that morning; and I with Miss Jeanie. Her
little foot was buried at once in the sliding gravel, over the dainty
low shoe; I wanted to carry her up, had only propriety sanctioned it.
At the top, Healy swept the horizon as if for spies; then bending over
us, all in a close group, he said:

“Them ain’t real niggers--them’s United States revenue officers from
New Orleans, under General McBride.”

“General McBride?”

“He’s in hidin’ in my hut. He wouldn’t black up. But them
deputy-marshals thought it was a spree. We had to do it. Every Saturday
the niggers are paid off--one dollar and fifty cents a day, nigh on to
ten dollars apiece--an’ then King Kelly he’d come down from his stills
in the mountain, with his men loaded with casks o’ pine-top, warranted
to kill--an’ by sundown eighteen hundred niggers would be blind-drunk,
an’ fit for shootin’. On last Sunday we lost sixty-two hands. An’ the
head contractor, he swore nigh to lift yer ha’r off.”

“Sixty-two men killed?” cried Jeanie, in horror.

“Some killed, some wounded; but it tells on the contract just the same.
Why, you could have heared ’em poppin’ all over camp.”

The Higginbothams had always been abolitionists; and I felt my
ancestors turn in their complacent graves.

“Expect to get Kelly this time?” said Coe.

“Dunno, we’ll see at twelve o’clock, when they’re paid off. It’ll be
quite a thing to see, all the same. But the ladies had better stay in
their tent. An’ it’s eleven now, so I reckon we’ll go back to camp.
See, there go the marshals.”

When we got back to camp Raoul received a telegram. He read it hastily,
and crumpled it into his pocket; but, I thought, looked troubled.

Jeanie and I wandered down by the brook side before dinner, and
afterward Raoul, Healy, Coe, and I sallied forth to “see the fun.” We
were let into the chief commissary’s hut, the front of which, above a
strong wooden bar, was open; and before it a great crowd of negroes,
singing and dancing, and a hundred others, in a long queue, waiting for
their pay. “You kin lie down on the floor ef they git to shootin’,”
said General McBride, whom we found there smoking placidly in a
cane-seated chair. “Those revolvers won’t carry through the boards.”

It was a curious spectacle, that line of coal-black, stalwart, “swamp”
negroes; and then to watch the first human expression--in their
case greed--impress their stolid features as they took their pay.
Among the crowd we noticed many bearded, well-armed, flannel-shirted
mountaineers; these we took to be the moonshiners; and near each one,
but loitering as if to avoid attention, one of the made-up negroes; to
us now obviously factitious. It was a wonder the moonshiners did not
find them out, but that they were intent on other things.

“See, that’s King Kelly,” whispered General McBride. “That big fellow
there with the slouched hat and rifle.” Having said this, I was
surprised to hear him, when the last man had been paid off, get up and
make a speech to the navvies, in which he congratulated them that the
camp had at last been freed from that great pest, Kelly; and urged them
to save their money and be abstemious. “I am General McBride, of New
Orleans----”

“Three cheers for Gineral McBride, of New Orleans!” cried a big mulatto
opposite, I thought at a sign from Healy. They were given, not very
heartily.

“And I’ve come up to see those poisoners keep away.”

I had seen the man he said was Kelly start and look about him, as if
for other enemies; then he stood still nervously, and fidgetted at his
gun. Meanwhile the General made quite a speech, apparently thinking the
opportunity too good a one to remain unimproved. He took every occasion
to heap obloquy upon the head of Kelly, king of the moonshiners; and
concluded by lamenting that that “poor white trash” would not dare to
show his head in camp while even he, McBride, was there alone.

“Look yar,” shouted Kelly, striding up to the bar of the tent when he
had got through, “I’m the man you call King Kelly; an’ I’ve got four
stills a-runnin’ within a bit an’ a screech of this yer camp; an’ I
kin tell yer it’s deuced lucky yer white-faced, biled-shirted revenue
officers stayed down to New Orleans.”

“And I,” said another, “I own a still myself; an’ it ain’t goin’ ter
stop up fur no United States Government--though we’re mighty glad to
see the Gineral, ez he comes here sociable and pleasant like.”

“And I,” “and I,” “and I;” and three more strode forward, and I noticed
a pair of pseudo darkies get behind each one as he moved.

“What’ll yer take ter drink, Gineral?” said Kelly. Quick as a flash,
every man had four stout arms about his neck, choking him, and the
handcuffs on his wrists. Not a shot was fired; and Kelly and his gang
were safely immured in an improvised guardhouse. The General sank back
upon his cane-seated chair.

“A pretty job, gentlemen,” said he. “What _will_ you take to
drink? None of their pine-top, though,” he added, with a laugh. “Yet, I
don’t know as you can hardly blame ’em--corn’s mighty scarce up here.”

“May I trouble you, sir, with a few words in private?” The voice was
serious, but familiar, and appertained to Mr. Hampton Raoul.




6.


“I HAVE appealed to you, sir,” said Raoul, when we had abandoned
the still quiet camp for the solitude of the forest, “to demand
that which every gentleman has the right to ask of every other.”

I feared the man had some notion of a duel, and his next words did not
tend to relieve me. “I have long loved Miss Bruce.”

I must have appeared disquieted, for he hastened to add, “Miss May
Bruce, I mean. But until yesterday I did not know my love was returned.
We have now resolved on being married.”

I expressed my congratulations, but intimated that I did not yet see
how my aid was necessary.

“We have resolved to make our bridal journey to the White Sulphur
Springs, in Virginia. We shall be married upon arrival there, and I
should esteem it a favor initial of a life-long friendship if you,
sir, would consent to be best man. Moreover, your escort may prove
necessary to Miss Jeanie to return.”

My escort! to Miss Jeanie! I was to travel with her four hundred
miles--meantime her sister philandering with this young man--perhaps
make a visit at a fashionable watering-place--give away her sister
in matrimony--and then make the principal bridesmaid companion of my
journey home! And this young Huguenot, _pour sauver la situation_,
called me her escort. I looked at Raoul; his attitude was impassive
and his manner still courteous; but evidently he thought there was
something unchivalric even in my hesitation.

“I--has Miss Jeanie Bruce,” I hazarded, “yet been told of your plans?”

“Of course--and she approves them. She can hardly invite you herself
to join her party; it might look forward, as you and she, necessarily,
will be left much to yourselves.”

Absent-mindedly I twirled the ring on my finger, still there, that she
had given me. Evidently, as a gentleman, in the eyes of him, of her,
and of her sister, there was nothing else for me to do. “I must see
Miss Bruce herself,” I gasped.

“Certainly,” said Raoul. “I had reckoned, sir, that such would be your
course. I will meet you in front of the commissary’s tent at three. We
start at four.” He stalked off, and left me under the live-oak tree.

It was two o’clock. I felt that I must see Miss Jeanie at once. Nothing
could exceed the good-breeding of her greeting; but she evidently
expected me to go. The calm of her gentle voice told me so. I found the
two beautiful young girls in afternoon toilette of white muslin, half
reclining under their open tent, fanning themselves. I think I would
not have been so much in doubt had not Jeanie been so very pretty.
Then, how hazard, in the presence of her sister, and of her own soft
eyes, the fear that she might be committing an impropriety?

And it was with the greatest difficulty and an acute sense of my own
brutality, that I did so. I began by congratulating Miss May, which
evoked a lovable blush. “You know we have to start after dark and
drive twenty miles to-night,” said she, “to a station on the Georgia
road--we cannot return the same way; Mr. Raoul has some reason.”

“Do you think that we four ought to go off--ought to go off just like
that?”

Miss Bruce looked at me, amazed. Jeanie tried to help her. “Do you not
have wedding-journeys in the North?”

“Alone, I mean,” I ended, desperately.

“Alone? Mrs. Judge Pennoyer is going.”

Mrs. Judge Pennoyer had all the elements of a true sport; and I went
back to Raoul--(having had a long walk down the brook with Jeanie; her
happiness in her sister’s prospects was quite charming)--an hour after
the time fixed, less decided--I think there is some adventurous blood
in the Higginbothams--and found the camp in a state of wild tumult.
Raoul met me nervously.

“General McBride paroled Kelly and his gang,” said he, “and the
moonshiners have come back from the mountains a hundred strong, and
given the revenue officers twenty minutes to leave for New Orleans.”

“And are they going?” said I.

“They calculate, sir, to go,” answered Raoul, gravely. “The mule team
will take them back to the head of the line, and there we have wired
for a special to carry them back to Bagdad. I have decided it is best
for us to go with them. The special train simplifies matters. I trust
you have come to a decision?”

“I--I do not know,” said I.

“We certainly cannot leave them here in camp. Every nigger in it
will be blind drunk before midnight, and they are fortifying the
commissary’s store.”

“What on earth did McBride mean by paroling those ruffians,” I sighed.
“It was beginning to be so pleasant.”

“It was an error of judgment. But it will be equally pleasant at White
Sulphur.”

As we talked we had returned to the centre of the camp. There we found
a picturesque scene. McBride and his men were seated in the glade of
the live-oak forest, no longer disguised; around them stood or lounged
some forty bearded mountaineers, all provided with long rifles. General
McBride was sitting with King Kelly himself, amicably drinking his own
“pine-top;” as we approached he rose to meet us and handed a telegram
to Raoul, who cast his eyes over it and gave it to me, with the remark
that it might assist my decision. It read:

  “If cousins Miss Bruce are with you, detain them and escorts. Will
  wire parental authority to-morrow.
                                                  “KIRK BRUCE.”

“I feel bound, sir, to ask you your intentions,” said McBride to Raoul.

“Miss May Bruce and I are to be married, sir.”

“In that case, sir,” said the General, “in the absence of parental
authority I cannot, of course, interfere. Permit me to congratulate
you.” They shook hands.

“And this Northern gentleman?”

“Goes with me, of course. And Mrs. Judge Pennoyer.”

“A most estimable lady. I knew her as a girl.”

“We thought of returning on your special.”

“An excellent idea. Particularly as I have an idea Mr. Bruce may pass
us on Number Two. But stop--we have unluckily only one mule-team.”

“Is there no room?” I asked. For I, myself, was beginning to see the
necessity of getting away--to White Sulphur or to Salem.

“Room enough--but you must remember we have nigh twenty miles through
the woods. These gentlemen--” and the General waved his hand at the
surrounding moonshiners--“will naturally take a few shots at us.”

We looked at one another in perplexity. The colloquy was interrupted
by the appearance of Jeanie and May, in travelling dress again, but
looking very charming, and Mrs. Judge Pennoyer. To her the situation
was rapidly explained.

I have before remarked that Mrs. Pennoyer was a true sport. She rose
immediately to the occasion, and desired to be introduced to King Kelly.

“Colonel Kelly,” said she, “these young ladies are travelling under my
protection. One of them is engaged to be married to Mr. Raoul, and they
are desirous of going to White Sulphur on their wedding journey. As
there is only one wagon they must return with General McBride’s party.
I trust the journey will be perfectly safe.”

Kelly scratched his head. “I can answer, of course, for these gentlemen
here,” said he, “but some of my friends are out’n the mountain, and
it may be difficult to notify them of the sitooation. Let me see your
team,” he added, as if a bright idea struck him.

The General and Kelly walked off in the direction of the wagon. The
ladies followed. Raoul, Healy, Coe, and I followed the ladies. The
undisguised United States marshals followed us, and the moonshiners
followed the marshals. It was a large wagon with high wooden sides,
bound with iron, and was used for bringing supplies to camp. A team of
six of the biggest mules--some fully eighteen hands high--was already
being harnessed to it.

“Reckon you can fix the ladies safely,” said Kelly. “We are good shots
on the mountain,” he added, significantly, to McBride.

“I see your idea,” said the General. “Bring some straw.”

The straw was brought and filled the bottom of the wagon. Upon this
sat the three ladies. McBride, Coe, and Healy went on the high front
seat; Raoul and I sat on the tail-board looking out behind; and the
eight revenue officers disposed themselves, four on each side, sitting
on the side-board with their legs hanging over. They had nothing but
six-shooters, which, however, they displayed with some ostentation.

“Colonel Kelly,” said Raoul, slipping down after he had taken his seat,
“lend me one of your rifles--I want it very particularly” (I heard him
add the name of “Kirk Bruce,” in the ear of that chief of moonshiners),
“and I’ll send it back in Number Four to-morrow.”

“By G-- you shall have it, sir.” And Kelly gave him his own. “I like
your spunk, sir; an’ if you’n Mrs. Raoul will come back here without
them darned biled-shirted gov’en’m’nt men, I’ll give you a real good
time.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” said Raoul. “Good-by--and fire high.”

We departed amid quite a cheer; lumbering out of the picturesque great
camp some two hours before sunset, and as we passed the negroes’
quarters, heard already sounds of revelry beginning. We felt the girls
were fairly safe between the double rampart of men. Still, the General
thought they had perhaps better not sing (which they were fond of
doing), so the long ride was rather silent. Raoul lay leaning back,
talking in whispers with May Bruce, and I was left to do the same with
Jeanie. Coming to the last long hill before the end of the line, one
or two shots were fired; but they whistled in the tree-tops far above
our heads. We found the “special” waiting for us, got into the one
“directors’ car,” and started safely.

But when we got to the siding at Bear Creek, Raoul asked the conductor
which train had the right of way. Learning that the special had,
he beckoned to me, and, taking his rifle, went out upon the rear
platform. I followed, wondering. Our train was running rather fast, the
engine having suddenly started up after Raoul’s conversation with the
conductor; I presume to him also Raoul had explained “the sitooation.”
At Bear Creek the regular up-train stood side-tracked waiting for us.
We rattled by, and on its rear platform, in the moonlight, I saw a tall
frock-coated figure standing. I had hardly recognized it to be Kirk
Bruce when Raoul threw up his rifle, and I saw a flash of fire from
the platform of the side-tracked Mr. Bruce. The reports were quite
simultaneous; but neither was hurt, for I saw Bruce leaning his head
out of the shadow of the platform to look at us, while Raoul remarked,
as we went back into the car, now jumping wildly on the down grade:

“He knew I was yere, and I knew he was thar. You’d hardly see worse
rifle-practice in the North.”

There was a tinge of disgust in his voice, and he went out to smoke on
the engine.

“Was it Cousin Kirk?” said May to me, breathlessly.

I nodded. Jeanie blushed.




7.


THE United States marshals from New Orleans had kept rather
quiet throughout the journey; but as we approached the city of Bagdad
their spirits rose. The momentary interest caused by Mr. Raoul’s and
Cousin Kirk’s shots had subsided when they learned there was nothing
national or professional in the affair. Amateur shooting was always
poor. But May Bruce was considered with more attention; and when their
“special” of a “shirt-tail” engine and a caboose backed up to the
Bagdad platform, they all requested to be presented to her. General
McBride performed the ceremony with much formality; including Mrs.
Judge Pennoyer, upon whom, I could see, they looked with a reverence
that only her years divided from admiration. Even Raoul came in for
some passive applause; but I played, as I saw, a very second fiddle,
which is why, perhaps, Miss Jeanie and I went off and took a walk, by
moonlight, down through the ravine where I first met her.

We returned to find Mrs. Pennoyer slumbering peacefully on a settee;
but Raoul was walking up and down nervously. The straight track
stretched glistening away in the moonlight, but not a train nor engine
was in sight.

“How long do you think it’ll take Mr. Bruce to get down back here?”
says Raoul to me, nervously.

“Train Number Two doesn’t come back till to-morrow, they said.”

“I know; but the station man here tells me the engineer on Number Two
married a cousin of Kirk Bruce’s brother-in-law. Our train doesn’t come
along from Memphis until four in the morning. And there’s not an engine
to be had in Bagdad.”

“There’s one,” said I; and I pointed to a distant shower of sparks
above the forest. At the same moment the peculiar light rattle of a
“wild” engine was audible.

“My God, sir, so it is!” answered Raoul. “And it’s on the line of the
Tennessee River and Gulf.”

“Number Two?” I answered, grimly, for I was getting to understand the
ways of the place. “What shall we do?”

“Do?” said Raoul; “why, get ready, of course. He may shoot before he
stops the engine; lucky I’ve got a rifle. You go in and prepare the
ladies.... This is my quar’l,” he added, impatiently, at my demur.
“Besides you ain’t got only that girl’s pop-gun. Reckon you’ll have a
chance later, likely.”

So I went in, and told the girls; and we woke up Mrs. Judge Pennoyer,
who, I am bound to say, took it more calmly than might have been
expected from a lady of her years. May was tearful; but Jeanie’s eyes
were very bright. All this time the rattle of the engine was growing
louder down the grade.

“Haven’t you kept that revolver I gave you?” said Jeanie to me.

I looked at her; and went out upon the platform just in time to see the
engine dash up, and a strange figure jump out of the cab.

“It’s all right,” he cried; “drop your iron. I’ve got a message from
King Kelly.” I observed the man had a blackened face and uncouth
costume; he did not look like an engineer, though a negro fireman was
on the smoking engine. The saturnine Raoul tore open the envelope, read
the letter twice, and handed it to me with the nearest approach to a
chuckle I had heard him give. I also read it, while the negro fireman
opened half his head and laughed aloud.

“What will you take, sir?” I heard Raoul say; then, as the ladies,
overcome by the curiosity this unexpected-silence caused, came out upon
the platform, I heard him introducing the man of the charcoal face to
each in turn.

The letter was as follows:

  “---- RAOUL, ESQ.

  “DEAR SIR: A gentleman have arrived here on Number Two,
  inkwiring for you, and I take him for to be a member of Mrs. Raoul’s
  family, so I got him and his ingineer here in Camp and reckon I kin
  hold him about till termorrer sundown.

                                             “Yours trooly,
                                                  “LUCIUS R. KELLY.”




8.


BEATI POSSIDENTES. I now saw that under the methods of Southern
courtship the man who had got the lady had a great advantage. The
Memphis express pulled up at four in the morning in front of a
burning tar-barrel on the track, which Raoul had placed there as a
hint to it to stop at Bagdad. How our story always got out so quickly,
I don’t know; but two members of Congress from Mississippi turned out
of the two end sections and were accommodated with shakedowns in the
smoking compartment of the crowded Pullman, with Raoul and myself.

I did not sleep very well, and at seven in the morning got out at
Chattanooga. What was my surprise at seeing Mrs. Judge Pennoyer also
emerge, fully dressed, from the sleeping-car.

“You young people don’t want me,” said she, benevolently. “I should
only be in the way. An’ I’m getting out here to take the day train on
to Knoxville. If I got out thar, they might stop ye before the train
pulled out again; now ye’ll all get by unbeknownst.”

What could I oppose to such strategy? Moreover, the young ladies were
still in their berths. I could not leave Miss Jeanie to come back
alone. I bowed; the train started; I got in it.

The sunlight broadened, but it was high noon and we had passed
Knoxville before the two girls appeared, fresher than the June morning,
and rosier, I am sure, than Raoul or I. With some trepidation I told
them of Mrs. Pennoyer’s evasion.

“Dear Aunt Emily,” said May, “she has always been like a mother to me.”
But Jeanie, I fancied, blushed; and that day talked to Raoul, while May
was left to me.

The impending catastrophe made May very gentle and silent, but we now
heard Jeanie and Mr. Raoul in speech of much light laughter at the
other end of the car.

“I suppose,” said I, “they are laughing at the way Mr. Kirk Bruce’s
pursuit has stopped in moonshine.”

Miss. May looked at me inquiringly. “Cousin Kirk was never attentive to
me,” said she.

“He is attentive enough now,” I laughed; and she looked at me as if
about to say something--but bit her red lips.

Jeanie certainly avoided me. When Raoul came back to talk to his
fiancée, her sister made pretext of a headache and lay down. The train
was not a quick one, and stopped long periods at several stations,
during which Raoul was obviously nervous. His brow only cleared when
we got to Bristol, Va., about sunset. Here we stopped an hour for
supper, half of which we four devoted to a walk. The town consisted
principally of a long straight street, lined by low two-story brick
shops; the one-story shops had false fronts and presented an appearance
of uniformity. Boots, saddles, guns, groceries, and drygoods were the
articles they sold.

I had noticed that Raoul kept persistently on one side of the street,
and when I started to cross over, to look at a particularly gorgeous
embroidered Mexican saddle on the other side, he held me back.

“This street,” said he, “is the State line between Virginia and
Tennessee. I think we had better keep on the Virginia side.”

“How odd,” said Jeanie, “to have a town divided against itself!”

“It is a great convenience,” answered Mr. Raoul. “When my father and
Colonel Carington had their dispute about the last constitutional
convention, both were candidates for the governorship, my father in
Tennessee and the colonel in Virginia. The constitution of Tennessee
disqualified a man who fought a duel from holding office. So my father
stood on the Virginia side of the street and the colonel in Tennessee.
The distance between the sidewalks is just about right, as you see.
There was a warrant out against my father in Tennessee and the colonel
in Virginia.”

“And did they fight?” I asked.

“Oh, yes--and the sheriffs looked on, but they couldn’t cross the
street. And the colonel, he allowed he was shot accidentally by a
bullet from another State. The case went up to the Supreme Court, but
they allowed they couldn’t say any duel was fought in Tennessee, and
the Constitution does not disqualify a man for shooting, but only just
for duelling.”

At this point a prolonged whistling recalled us to the station. Here we
found an elegant Pullman car added to the train for our accommodation,
“with the superintendent’s compliments to Mr. Raoul.” The darky porters
in it were smiling broadly, and on the table was a huge bouquet of
orange-blossoms.

In the morning we woke up--or Raoul woke me up--at the station for
White Sulphur. He had a telegram signed “Emily Pennoyer,” which warned
him to lose no time, that Kirk Bruce was on the night express.

“May and I have decided to go to the county Judge and get married
directly,” said he. Our Pullman car had been shunted on a side track at
the little station; the rest of the train had gone on, and the little
village was quiet and fragrant as a bank of wild flowers. “Fortunately,
he is a friend of my father’s.”

We found the Judge, I think, before his breakfast, smoking on his
piazza, which was covered with jasmine and magnolia. He led us directly
across the road to a little brick court-house, where he found another
couple waiting already, more sheepish than ourselves, who had driven
all night in a buggy, with an old white horse. The groom was awkward
and embarrassed, with his trousers tucked in his boots; the bride was
buxom and blushing, but seemed hardly more than a child.

“First come, first served,” said the Judge, and we all went into the
court-house, where the clerk unlocked his register, and the blushing
pair stood up before us, the groom having first hitched the old white
horse to the fence outside. We four were accommodated with seats upon
the bench.

“Do you think she’s twenty-one?” whispered the Judge to Raoul, while
the rustic bride shuffled uneasily upon her new shoes.

“Twenty-one? She’s not eighteen,” said Raoul.

“Dear me,” whispered the Judge. “Guess she’ll have to be--reckon I’ll
forget to ask her.”

The pair were married with us as witnesses; Jeanie gave the bride
her parasol for a wedding present, and the old white horse and buggy
scrambled away. “And now,” said the Judge, turning to Jeanie, “how old
are you?”

There was a pause of embarrassment; then Raoul spoke up bravely: “It’s
not Miss Jeanie--it’s Miss May Bruce, and she’s quite eighteen.”

“Eighteen?” said the Judge. “She must be twenty-one--or have you the
parents’ consent?”

“No,” said Raoul. “Eighteen is old enough in Alabama.”

“Twenty-one in Virginia,” said the Judge. “Give me the Code.”

The clerk handed him a musty leather volume from beneath a musty
leather Bible. Twenty-one it was, sure enough.

“Why did you say she was only eighteen?” said the Judge, peevishly.

“But you married the others,” answered I.

“True,” said the Judge, “but I’ve had a telegram for you--from a Mr.
Kirk Bruce, who, I take it, is a relative of the bride.”

Raoul’s face maintained its customary look of quiet determination.
“Where is the nearest State where a lady is free to get married at
eighteen?”

“South Carolina,” said the Judge.

“All right,” said Raoul. “I’ve got a car, and I reckon Colonel
Carington will give us transportation.”

“I’ll see that he does,” said the Judge, his face brightening. “I guess
you’d better go to Charleston.”

“Spartanburg is the nearest point,” said Raoul. “He’ll never think of
Spartanburg.”

“True,” said the Judge, “he’ll never think of Spartanburg. Lucky,
Colonel Carington is at the Springs.”

In two hours we had borrowed an old freight engine and were off on our
way to Spartanburg.




9.


THE freight engine had been loaned us by telegram from Colonel
Carington, and we had found our Pullman car pulled up on an old rusty
side-track that ran into a bed of wild flowers; on the front platform,
half smothered by them, our two darkies were asleep. They wakened,
however, to greet us with smiles of such expansive intimacy that I felt
bound, when we were safely on the way, to put them _au courant_ of
the situation. The solemnity and sympathy their faces at once assumed
guaranteed their discretion; though I afterward heard the “conductor”
adjuring the engineer from the front platform to “git up that thar
burro-engine wif’m bacon-ham.” Whereupon the engineer sanded the track
and blew “off brakes.”

The long journey was rather distressing, however. The brave girls did
not lose their spirits, but they kept to themselves, resting in the
state-room, while Raoul and I sat on the rear platform and watched the
dust eddy up from the long single track behind us. We had innumerable
waits and sidings; where often the girls and I wandered into the woods
after wild flowers, while Raoul stayed behind to pepper Mrs. Judge
Pennoyer with telegrams. We were now by the highest mountains of the
East; Roan Mountain still, though it was June, was rosy-robed about its
shoulders with the laurel.

The day wore on, and I could get no speech with Jeanie. I looked for my
_dédommagement_ to the journey home. This I no longer dreaded; it
was a rosy hope. But Jeanie was so timid, now--or I was bolder. In the
evening we had a long wait for the night express, which rattled by our
siding at a wood-and-water station.

“Perhaps Mr. Bruce is on that train,” I laughed.

“No,” said Raoul, gravely (he never had a sense of humor); “I am
confident he is not.”

“How do you know?”

“I have had a telegram from Mrs. Judge Pennoyer.”

“Is she his confidante?”

“She says that he has suddenly decided to await your return in
Knoxville.”

“Await my return?”

“Certainly--yours and Miss Jeanie’s. I conclude the Judge this morning
wired him an answer that it was not Jeanie who was getting married.”

I gasped. “Then it was not you, after all, he was chasing?”

“Why, of course not.”

“Why did you run away so?”

Raoul looked at me as who should say, “Oh, these Northerners!”

“Perhaps it wasn’t necessary,” he added, with that faint tinge of
sarcasm which is akin to humor. “Is that your ring you wear upon your
finger?”

I know I started; and I felt myself blush. “It--it was given to me to
wear,” I gasped.

“Exactly--and by Miss Jeanie Bruce--and Mr. Kirk Bruce gave it to
Miss Jeanie. Of course he thought--when he heard a Miss Bruce and a
gentleman had gone off to get married----”

“Kirk Bruce gave it to her?” I said. My mind works slowly at such
times.

“Certainly. Did she not tell you so?”

“She said a gentleman gave it her----”

“Well, he was the gentleman.”

“Who had shot a schoolmate at boarding-school----”

“Same man, I assure you.”

“For being attentive to a young lady who----”

“Kirk Bruce, to a T.”

“Went out without a revolver----”

“As you did yourself. I think,” concluded Raoul, “you had better give
Miss Jeanie her ring back.”

“If I do,” said I, “I’m damned.”




10.


THEY were married the next day in the pretty little Episcopal
church in Spartanburg, by the Bishop of Georgia. They left the same
afternoon on their wedding journey back to “Old White” and the North.
Miss Jeanie Bruce and I accompanied them--or rather, they us--as far as
the junction station (I forget its name), where they met the east-bound
train, and we were to keep on to Knoxville.

Jeanie’s sweet face was very pale, but her eyes were like deep
wells--so deep now that they indeed “unravelled the coiled night and
saw the stars by noon.” She had to sit by me now; but her silence
appealed even to a blunted Northern sense of chivalry. I foresaw that
I, too, should have to keep silence until I had brought her home to
Knoxville. But not a day longer! Not an hour, I finally vowed.

But oh, the beauty of that immediate future! The long twenty hours’
journey after they left us at the junction--where she was under my
protection, and no Kirk Bruce could say me nay! Even chivalry at such
times is like a _sordine_ on one harp-string--heart-string I had
almost said. And one’s being is so resonant that the note of speech is
hardly missed.

So, I had my two-hours’ day-dream, and then Mrs. Judge Pennoyer turned
up on that east-bound train, as chaperone to bring us home.

“You telegraphed for her?” I said to Jeanie.

She did not deny it; and I thought Mrs. Pennoyer cast one look at me as
of contempt.

Then I saw her see the ring upon my finger, and her expression seemed
to change.

We saw the happy pair go off, and we went back to our seats in the
returning train. We three; and one of us most miserable, and that was I.

I had given up all hope of talking with Jeanie any more. She went
off with Mrs. Pennoyer to a front seat, where I saw them in earnest
consultation; and that ancient relict of justice tempered by mercy
appeared to be speaking of me. I watched them; and I heard the words
“Mr. Bruce” and “the ring;” and I saw Jeanie grow still more pale.

Finally, to my glad astonishment, she rose, and like a brave lady--not
like those Northern girls I knew in Salem, who would not dare throw a
man a life preserver to save him from drowning--sweet and gracious, she
came back to me.

“Mr. Higginbotham” (what a name to set by Raoul, or even Bruce), “I
must have my ring again,” said she.

“Never,” I answered. “It is not your ring, but mine.”

“I only lent it to you. I did not give it.”

“Then lend it to me a little longer--till I have seen you home,” I said.

Her eyes filled with tears, and my heart was drowned in them.

“But Mrs. Pennoyer says Cousin Kirk is waiting for us there. Oh,
please.”

“Let him wait,” I said.

“But, please. I implore you--as you----”

“As I love you,” I said. “As I love you, I shall keep it. Will you
marry me?”

“I--I do not love you,” she answered, almost in a whisper. “Now, will
you give it back?”

“No,” I said.

I saw her tears. “He will kill you;” and she left me, sobbing.

“Then, you can take it,” I called out, after her.

Man can be brutal at such times.

Mrs. Pennoyer came back and tried to move me. Who could, after Jeanie
Bruce had failed? Moreover, I thought she thought she would have done
like me.

I fear Jeanie cried most of that journey home. But I, as is the way of
man, was happy.

We got back to Knoxville in the early morning. They did not wish me to
go home with them from the station; so I put them in a carriage, and
sat upon the box. We drove up to the piazza of the little house upon
which sat a man in a black frock-coat, smoking a cigar. He threw it
away, and took off his hat to the ladies. We both assisted them out;
and Jeanie ran quickly into the house, Mrs. Judge Pennoyer following. I
paid the carriage, and it drove away.

“Now, sir,” said Mr. Kirk Bruce.

“Now, sir,” said I.

“I will request you, sir, for to give me that ring that is on your
finger.”

“That ring does not belong to me.”

“That is why, sir, I ask you as a gentleman, fo’ to give it up.”

“That is why, sir, I am compelled as a gentleman, fo’ to refuse.”

Insults to one’s diction come next to those that touch the heart. Mr.
Bruce had me, forthwith, “covered” with his revolver.

“Are you engaged to Miss Jeanie Bruce?”

“I am not.”

“Then, sir, as a gentleman, you have no right to wear that ring.”

I had heard vague stories of firing through one’s coat pocket; and
I felt in mine for the little revolver Jeanie had given me. But the
miserable little toy was turned the wrong way, and I could not twist it
about.

“He is engaged to me--he is,” cried Jeanie, bursting out from the front
door. “He asked me on the train.”

“And you refused me,” I said, turning my eyes for one moment away from
Bruce to look at her.

“I did not--I only----”

How it happened, I do not know; but at that instant the confounded
revolver went off in my pocket. With a cry, Jeanie threw up her arms
and fell upon the floor of the piazza. Bruce and I were at her feet
instantly. Mrs. Pennoyer rushed out. The neighbors rushed across from
over the way.

“Is she killed?” said Bruce and I, together.

As we spoke Jeanie made a dart, and picking up Bruce’s revolver, which
he had dropped upon the grass, threw it over a high board fence into
the neighboring lot. Then turning, “Give me your ring,” said she.

I gave it to her.

“And now,” she said, replacing it on another finger, “Cousin Kirk,
let me introduce to you the gentleman to whom I am to be married--Mr.
Higginbotham, of Boston.”

“Salem,” I corrected, in a dazed way.

“Of Salem. Cousin Kirk--congratulate him.”

Cousin Kirk looked at her, at me, and at the board fence.

“As a gentleman, sir, I have no other thing to do. Of course--if my
cousin loves you--you may keep the ring. Though I must allow, sir, you
shoot rather late.”

With this one simple sarcasm he departed. Jeanie and I watched him
groping in the long grass of the next lot for his revolver and then go
slouching down the road. We turned and our eyes met. I tried to take
her hand; but suddenly her face grew scarlet. “Oh, what have I done?”
and she rushed into the house.

I went back to Salem.

       *       *       *       *       *

I stayed there just four days. In New York I met Jerry Sullivan and had
a talk with him. He will, in future, suppress his sense of humor when
inditing telegrams.

Then I wrote and asked Jeanie if she would accept me, save at the
pistol’s mouth.

Mr. and Mrs. Raoul accompanied us on our wedding journey; and we were
married at White Sulphur by the genial justice _de céans_.




LOS CARAQUEÑOS

BEING THE LIFE HISTORY OF DON SEBASTIAN MARQUES DEL TORRE AND OF
DOLORES, HIS WIFE, CONDESA DE LUNA




I.


PAGANISM was the avowal of life; Christianity the sacrifice of
it. So the world civilized has always separated at the two diverging
roads, according as brain or blood has ruled their lives; the Turanian
races, and after them the Latins, to assert life; the Semitic races,
and after them the Teutons, to deny it. So the Church of Rome, as
nearest in time to Paganism, has been nearer the avowal of life, has
recognized, through all its inquisitions, human hearts; the Sects have
sought to stifle them; the Puritans have posed to ignore them. Thus
cruelty may be the crime of priests; hypocrisy has been the vice of
preachers.

Hence my poor friend Tetherby, spinning his affections from his brain,
tired with a mesh of head-wrought duties, died, or rather ceased to
live, of a moral heart-failure. His heart was too good to be made out
of brains alone; and his life was ended with the loss of that girl
of his--what was her name, Myra, Marcia?--born, in the Northland, of
a warmer blood, who fell a victim there, as the rose-tree does in too
cold a climate, to the creeping things of earth. Now it happened that
that same year I was told the story of Dolores, Marquesa del Torre y
Luna, almost the last of the old Spanish nobility of Carácas, called la
doña sola de la casa del Rey--as we should say, the lonely lady of the
house of the King--for she lived there, married and widow, fifty years,
and left no child to inherit the thick-walled city house, four square
about its garden, and the provinces of coffee-trees, and, what she
prized more and we prize less, the noble blood of Torre and of Luna,
now run dry.

There are two things in the little city of Carácas that go back to the
time when the Spanish empire made a simulacrum of the Roman round the
world--one is the great round-arched Spanish bridge, spanning the deep
arroyo on the mountain slope above the present town--useless now, for
the earthquake clefts are deeper on either side than this gorge of the
ancient river of the city, and have drained its stream away--and the
other this great stone fortress in the centre of the present town,
with walls eight feet thick, its windows like tunnels cut through to
the iron unglazed casement--for this was the only house that was left
standing on the evening of the great earthquake; and so the modern city
clusters timidly about it, its houses a modest one- or double-story,
and, on the clay slope where the older city was, the cactus grows,
and the zenith sun burns the clay banks red, and the old “gold-dust
road,” over the Cordillera to the sea, now but a mule-path of scattered
cobble-stone, winds lonely and narrow across the splendid bridge, among
the great fissures that the earthquake left. And both bridge and house
still bear the sculptured blazonry, the lions and the castles, and the
pious inscription to the greater glory of the Virgin.

Carácas lies in a plain, like the Vega of Granada, only green with
palms as well as poplars; but through its rich meadows a turbid
mountain torrent runs, and south, and west, and east are mountains;
and north the mighty Silla lifts almost to the snows, half breaking
the ceaseless east wind of the sea; trade-wind, it has been called
in history; slave-wind were better. And by the little city is the
palm-clad Calvareo, the little hill gay with orchids and shaded by
tree-ferns, in whose pleasant paths the city people still take their
pleasure (for the name of Calvary but means the view, not any sadness),
and took their pleasure, eighty years since, when this story begins.
And one evening, in the early years of the century, there walked alone,
or with but a nurse for her dueña, a girl whose beauty still smiles
down through sad tradition and through evil story, to lighten the dark
streets of the old Spanish town, whose stones for many years her feet
have ceased to press. And the memory of the old Casa Rey, the castle,
all is hers; and the people of the town, the Caraqueños, still see
her lovely face at the window; first at one, and then at the other,
but mostly at the grated window in the round tower of the corner,
that projects and commands the two streets; for there her sweet, pale
face used to show itself, between the bars, and watch for the cavalry
her noble husband led, returning from the wars. For then were wars of
liberation, when freedom was fought for, not possession and estates;
and the Marquis Sebastian Ruy del Torre led in all. And days and days
she would watch for him returning, after battles won, she sitting with
her golden needle-work at the corner window, her night-black hair
against the iron bar (for there are no glass window-panes in Carácas),
her strange blue eyes still watching down the street. So she sat there,
and broidered chasuble or altar-cloth for the holy church of Santa
Maria de las Mercedes, where she prayed each dawn and evening, yet cast
her eyes down either street between each stitch, to watch the coming of
him she loved on earth. And the people of Carácas used to gather her
glances to their hearts, like blue flowers, for of herself they saw no
more than this.

But her husband, from their wedding-day, never saw her more. For fifty
years she sat at this window, working chasuble and stole, and always,
when the distant trumpet sounded, or the first gold-and-scarlet pennon
fluttered far down the street, she would drop her work and rise. And
then she would wave her hand, and her husband would wave his hand, at
the head of his column far away. This was for the populace. But then
she would go from the window; and be seen there no more while he stayed
at Carácas.... But those that were beneath the window used to say (for
the husband was too far off then to see) that before she left the
window, she would cast a long look down the street to that distance
where he rode, and those that saw this glance say that for sweetness no
eye of mortal saw its equal, and the story is, it made little children
smile, and turned old bad men good, and even women loved her face.

Then she vanished from the tower, and they saw her no more. During all
the time that might be the Marquis’s stay, no more she came to the
window, no more to the door. State dinners were given there in the
King’s house; banquets, aye, and balls, where all that was Castilian in
Carácas came; but the custom was well known, and no one marvelled that
the châtelaine came not to meet them; the lovely Lady Dolores, whom no
one ever spoke to or saw. Some dueña, some relation, some young niece
or noble lady, cousin of either the del Torre, was there and did the
honors. And of the Marquesa no one ever spoke, for it was understood
that, though not in a convent, she was no longer in the world--even to
her husband, it was said, at first with bated breath, then openly.

For the servants told, and the family, and it was no secret, how days
and weeks before her lord returned the lady would busy herself with
preparations. And their state suite of rooms, and their nuptial-chamber
(into which, alas! she else had never come!) were prepared by her, and
made bright and joyous with rich flowers, and sweet to his heart by
the knowledge of her presence, and the touch of her dear hand. Then,
when all was done, and one white rose from her bosom in a single vase
(and in a score of years this white rose never failed), she darkened
the rooms and left them for his coming, and went back to her seat in
the stone-floored tower room, and sat there with her gold and silver
embroidery, and so watched for him. And while he stayed in his palace,
she lived in those cold, bare rooms; for they alone had not been
changed when they were married, but had been kept as they had been a
prison, and my lady Dolores loved them best; but she came not now to
the window, lest their eyes might meet.




II.


SO fifty years she lived there; and that is why the old Spaniard
of Carácas still points out the house, and young men and maidens
like to make their trysting-places of its gardens, which are
public and where the band plays evenings--if that can be called
trysting to our northern notions, which is but a stolen mutual glance
in passing. But hearts are warm in Catholic Spain, and they dare not
more; right hard they throb and burn for just so much as this--aye, and
break for the lack of it. I say, fifty years--fifty years she lived
there, but forty she lived alone, for at the end of ten years he died;
and the manner of her living and his dying is what I have to tell.

But after that still forty years she lived on alone. Now she no longer
worked at the window, and she came there but rarely. It seemed she came
there for compassion, that the people, whom she felt so loving, might
see her smile. For her smile was sweet as ever, only now it bore the
peace of heaven, not the yearning love of earth. Yet never went she out
her doors. And when she died--it is only some years since--they buried
her upon Good Friday, and she sleeps in her own church, beneath the
great gold shrine she loved and wrought for, of Mary, Mother of the
Pities. And all the people of the city saw her funeral; and there is,
in the church, a picture of the Virgin, that is really her, painted by
a dying artist that had seen her face at the window many years before.

And did they not, the Caraqueños, wonder and ask the cause of
this?--What was it?--They do not know--But did they not ask the story
of the lonely lady, so well known to them?--They asked many years
since; but soon gave over; partly that the secret was impenetrable,
partly for love of her. For they had, the poorest peasant of them, that
quick sympathy to stanch heart’s wounds that all the conventions of
the strenuous North must lack. God gives in all things compensation;
and even sins, that are not mean or selfish, have their half atoning
virtues. Their silence was soothing to her sorrow; they never knew.
But the priest?--The Church of Rome is cruel, but it keeps its secrets.
And only it and Heaven know if their lives were one long agony of
misguidance, as many lives must be on earth--perhaps sometimes the
priest-confessor may help in such affairs; if so, God speed the
Jesuits. But one thing is sure: in all their lives, after their
marriage, they never met. She died old, in gentle silence; he still
young, upon a bloody field; and now their eyes at last met in Heaven,
“her soul he knows not from her body, nor his love from God.”

And we may, harmless, venture to tell what the people of Carácas
say--with reverent memory, and loving glances at the old stone house;
the hearts that inhabited it are cold; but its Spanish arms above the
door still last, clear-cut as on the day the pride of this world’s life
first bade the owner place them there.




III.


IN the Calvareo that evening the Doña Dolores walked alone,
with only old Jacinta, the black nurse; black she was called, but her
hair alone was black--blue-black; her face was of that fiery brown
that marks the Venezuelan Indian; she was not fat, as most nurses, but
stood erect, with fierce lurid eyes, her hair in two tight braids, and
was following and watching her gentle charge. Jacinta had things to
do in our story; her race has nothing of the merry sloth, the gross
animality of the negro; what things Jacinta found to do, were done.
She was scarce a dozen years older than her mistress, and her form was
still as lithe, her step as firm and quick as that of that boy of hers,
now twelve, in the military school, training under the _soutane’d_
Jesuits for the service of the Church--or Bolivar. And in the Calvareo
also that evening were two men--nephew and uncle, both cousins of
Dolores--and not, of course, walking with her or speaking to her, save
by reverent bows; and, on the nephew’s part at least, by looks of fire.
Yet the uncle might, perhaps, have walked with her, even in Carácas;
for he, whom men called the General, despite his prouder titles, was
not her cousin only, but her guardian.

Dolores and her maid have traversed the spiral path to the summit of
the little hill; there is a little pool and fountain that the Moors,
generations back, had taught these people’s ancestors to build; and
from a bench among the orchids and the jasmine, and the charming
amaryllis lily, standing sentry by her, like a band of spearmen, sees
Dolores the lovely valley, purple in the first shadows of the short
tropic day, and, on the southern mountain, the white walls of the
Archbishop’s new convent; to the north, and higher, the little mountain
fort guarding the road to the coast, and, as she looks, it dips its
colors to the sunset, which are the yellow and red--the blood and
gold--of Spain, and the booming of its little cannon echoes down the
valley and the Angelus replies. Then she turns, and touches tenderly
(not plucks) a marvellous lonely flower that blooms beside her. It
is the Eucharis Amazonica, the lily of the Amazon, but known to her
only as the _Flor del Espiritu santo_--the flower of the Holy
Ghost. One moment, it seems that she will be disturbed. The younger
man has left the older on his walk--for they are not always together,
and gossip has made him suitor for his cousin’s hand, and he stands
a moment watching her, behind a group of tree-ferns. No lovelier a
girl had surely even his eyes ever rested on, as she sat there stilly,
though her wonderful eyes were lost to him, following the sunset. And
she was the greatest heiress in all the Spanish Main.

He might have stepped forward, into the open, to her, and no one but
Jacinta would have known. Perhaps he was about to do so; but suddenly
there appeared, on the hilltop beside them, a tall figure dressed in
a purple gown, with hood and trimmings of bright scarlet, looking
like a fuchsia flower; on his head was a little black velvet covering
shaped half like a crown. It was the young Jesuit, the Archbishop
of the Guianas. Dolores rose and kissed his hand, bending the knee
respectfully; he sat down beside her.




IV.


THE Condesa de Luna, the orphan daughter of dead parents who
represented both branches of a famous old Gothic family, already known
about the capital for her beauty, was known far and wide as the richest
heiress in all Venezuela and Guiana; her prairies stretched from the
ocean to the Apure, her herds so countless that they roamed wild upon
pampas which were hers, hunted by peons who were hers. The old stone
castle with the Spanish arms was hers, and another like it stood empty
for her in far Madrid. Her guardian, the Marquis del Torre, was a poor
man beside her; and his nephew, Don Ramon, poorer still.

Dolores was brought up as follows: At five she rose, and went, with
Jacinta, to early mass--nearly always to a different church, as is the
seemly custom in Carácas, lest young men should take advantage of it
and take position behind the chairs of their adored ones in church,
where they could not be repelled; for, of course, no young gentleman,
however madly in love, would insult his lady by accosting her in the
open street. After mass, at six, being the time of sunrise and by
comparison safe, Jacinta would take her charge for a walk, usually on
the Calvareo, then deserted. At seven they would be home, and then in
the great court-yard, under the palms and rose-red orchids, Dolores
would take her lessons--French, English, music--all from priests. At
eleven, bath; at twelve, breakfast; then reading, perhaps a siesta in
a hammock made of birds’ plumage. So she passed her days, all in the
half-light of the great court-yard; only toward sunset again would
she see the open sky, driving with one of her two governesses in the
state carriage down the broad valley to where the wheel road stopped,
and back again; or more rarely, as on this night, venturing on another
walk. And all the youth of Carácas would gaze after her carriage;
the young men driving out too, by themselves, in carriages, who had
passed their days more in gambling or cock-fighting than with books and
music; never, indeed, at mass. For here the lords of creation vent
their authority in ordaining their wives and sisters to the Church and
goodness, themselves to evil. But the most hardened duellist among
them could no more than look at Dolores; only her reckless cousin
Ramon would venture to ride athwart her carriage, and presume upon his
cousinship to bow.

Yet intercourse is possible always betwixt young people who seek each
other out; and all Carácas gave Ramon to her for her suitor. And
to-night even, as he stood and glowered at the Archbishop from behind
the tree-ferns, he had another chance. For there is, and was, one more
strange custom in this strange city; at the sunset hour the young
ladies of Carácas, all in their gayest dresses, sit in the great open
windows and look upon the street--a curious sight it is to see the
bright eyes and white throats thrust, like birds from a cage, through
the iron bars of the sombre stone windows. (For no wind or cold ever
needs a window of glass in that perpetual perfect weather; the high sun
never makes a shutter needful in the narrow streets.) And there they
sit, unoccupied; and the young men of the city, dressed also in their
best, walk by as slowly, and look as lingeringly, as they dare; and
perhaps, if the dark shadow of mamma or the dueña does not come out too
quickly from the inner room, a few quick words are spoken, and a flower
left or given. And what says the old proverb of the Caraqueños?

“_Better two words in secret than a thousand openly._”

Sebastian Ruy, Marques del Torre, too, was bred as a young nobleman of
oldest lineage should be, or should have been, in that early eighteenth
century that still lingered then in the Andes. But this took him to
Madrid and to Paris in the years VII. and VIII.; and the eighteenth
century, as one knows, ended in those wee small numbers. Torre came
back to plunge his country in a revolution which lasted intermittently,
like one of its own volcanoes, for more than twenty years. The young
Parisian étudiant began his first émeute in Carácas itself, with a
barricade after the orthodox fashion of the years I. and II. This being
quickly suppressed--partly that there were no pavements, and partly
that each house was an impregnable fortress--but mostly that the city
was of the governing class and stood with Spain--Torre had had to leave
the capital for the pampas, where, for over twelve years, he maintained
discursive warfare with a changeable command of Indians and peons,
which, however, on the whole, increased in numbers, officered by a few
young gentlemen, under himself. His marquisate he forgot, and sought to
make others forget it. He was, throughout Venezuela, The General. He
had never been back within the walls of Carácas; and, at nearly forty,
he learned of his only aunt’s death following his uncle’s, and of the
little girl they left, and of his guardianship.

A little girl she appeared to his imagination on the pampas; when
he got to Carácas, she was a young woman. The General’s locks were
already grizzled and his face weather-beaten with ten years’ open life
on the plains; his face was marked, close beside the eye, with the
scar of a sabre. He had one interview with Dolores, saw her nurse, her
instructors, her father confessor; heard stories about his nephew Don
Ramon, which troubled him, went back to camp.

Then intervened a brief campaign in the mountains of the Isla
Margarita; Torre went there to take command. This is the famed old
island of pearls; they lie there in the reefs amid the bones of men and
ships. Torre found no pearls, but he defeated the royal troops in the
first engagement resembling an open battle he had ventured fight. This
matter settled, he lay awake at night, and thought about his new ward.
Further tidings reached him from Carácas, of his nephew. It was said
young Ramon boasted he would marry her. Then the King, as is the royal
way after defeat in battle, made further concessions to the “Liberals,”
as the revolutionists were called; and in the coaxing amity of the
time, Torre was permitted, nay, invited, to return to the capital. He
did so, and was immediately tendered a banquet by the royal Governor,
and a ball at which his ward was present. The royal Governor and his
lady sat beneath a pavilion, webbed of the scarlet and gold of Spain.
The Countess Dolores came and curtsied deeply to them; then she rose
the taller for it, and as she turned haughtily away they saw that she
was almost robed in pearls; three strands about her neck and six about
her waist; and the ribbon in her mantilla was pale green, white, and
red. El Gobernador only smiled at this, the liberal tricolor, and made
a pretty speech about it; but the vice-regal lady made some ill-natured
reference to the pearls, as spoils from Margarita. Don Ramon was
standing by and heard it. The General saw it not.

After the formal dance the General went up to compliment his ward.
This was the first time he had seen her since his return; for even he
could not call save in the presence of the family; and she had no other
family than himself. He could not call on her until--unless--he married
her. He said, “I am glad my lady Countess is kinder to our colors than
my nephew.” He watched her as he said this; she started, and at the
end of the sentence blushed. He saw her blush. Then he bowed, as if to
retire.

“The pearls,” she said, hastily, “are all I have; see!” And the
Marquis, bowing, saw that the neck-strands were not a necklace, but
after passing thrice around her neck, descended to be lost in the laces
of her dress.

The Marquis ended his bow, and went back to camp. Next week there came
an Indian soldier to Dolores with a box of island pearls; they were
large as grapeshot, and went thrice about her waist. But the General no
longer contradicted her engagement to his nephew.




V.


THE General had never known women; he had only known what
men (and women, too) say of women. At Paris, and Madrid, he had seen
his friends see dancers, figurantes; he did not confound other women
with these, but he had known none other. Of girls, in particular, he
was ignorant. A man of Latin race never sees a girl; in America, North
America, it is different, and one sometimes wonders if we justify it.

Some weeks after the General got back to his camp (which was high
up amid the huge mountain, the first mainland that Columbus saw,
which fends the Gulf of Paria from the sea), he was astounded by the
appearance of no less a person than his nephew Ramon. He had broken
with the royal cause, he said, and come to seek service beneath
his uncle. He did not say what statement he had left behind him in
Carácas--no explanation was necessary in the then Venezuela for
joining any war--but how he had justified his delaying his coming
nuptials with Dolores. For he loved her, this young fellow; yet he
said--allowed it to be said--that in the process _de se ranger_,
in the process of arrangement, for his bride, that she might find her
place unoccupied, certain other arrangements had been necessary which
took time.

He did not tell this story to his uncle, who took him and sought to
make a soldier of him. Not this story; but he told him that he loved
Dolores; and his uncle--was he not twenty years younger?--believed him.
Twenty years, or fifteen; ’tis little difference when you pass the
decade.

But the General found him hard material to work up. He was ready enough
at a private brawl; ready enough, if the humor struck him, to go at
the enemy; but not to lead his men there. And his men were readier to
gamble with him than to follow him; though brave enough, in a way.

Yet the General Marquis blinded his faults--aye, and paid his
debts--for when he lost at “pharaon” a certain pearl he wore, the
uncle bought it back for him, with a caution to risk his money, not
his honor; at which the young captain grit his teeth, and would have
challenged any but a creditor. And when a certain girl, a Spanish
woman, followed him to camp, del Torre knew of it, and helped Ramon to
bid her go; and if the General thought the worse of him, he did not
think Dolores loved him less; for was not Sebastian himself brought up
on that cruel half-truth that some women still do their sex the harm to
make a whole one? that women love a rake reformed. Then came a battle,
and both were wounded, and more concessions from his Catholic Majesty;
and in their wake the wounded gentlemen went back to Carácas.

The General’s hair was grayer, and in that stay again he saw Dolores
only once, and that was in church. At mass, high mass, _Te Deum_,
for the Catholic Majesty’s concessions, Don Ramon stood behind her
chair; and del Torre saw them from a pillar opposite, and again the
girl countess blushed. And after mass the new Archbishop met him in the
street and talked--of him, and of his ward, and of Don Ramon.

“He is a graceless reprobate,” said this peon-priest.

The Marquis sighed. “A soldier--for a brave man there is always hope.”

The Archbishop eyed him.

“She loves him?”

“She loves him.”

“He is poor!”

“She is rich.”

“You should marry her,” said the Archbishop, and shrugged his shoulders.

A week after he met them all again; and this was that evening in the
garden.




VI.


NOW, this arch-priest had been a peon, and a soldier in del
Torre’s army; and then he had left it, and had seen the viceroy and
been traitor to the rebels, and so became a priest; and then, heaven
and the vice-queen knew how, bishop; and but that his archiepiscopal
credentials were now fresh from Rome, del Torre, still a Catholic, had
called him traitor! Del Torre could not like the man, though he stood
between him and God; and he knew that disliking must be mutual; and he
marvelled, simple soldier! that the intoxicating message came from him.
But he put this cup of heaven from his lips.

For del Torre, from his fierce August of war, had learned to love this
April maiden with all his heart, and with all his life and his strong
soul. Were not his hairs gray, and his face so worn and weather-beaten?
And his heart--he had none fit for this lady of the light. Enough that
it was his pearls that clasped her slender waist.

The Archbishop, too, had seen his gray hairs; yet he thought that it
was best? He had said so. Perhaps he wanted her possessions for the
Church. His nephew Don Ramon cursed the Archbishop for sitting there
that night, and saying to her--what? Novitiate and convent, perhaps, or
his own sins. For the lady Dolores was devout as only girls can be who
have warm hearts and noble souls, and are brought up in cloisters.

Del Torre stood on the other side of the Calvary hill, where the
sunset lay, and looked at it, dimly--for his heart was breaking;
the Archbishop kept close his converse with Dolores; perhaps he saw
her fiery younger lover lurking in the branches. She rose--she and
Jacinta--and the priest walked home with them. He talked to her of
nephew Ramon and his crimes--not his sins with women, for the priest,
too, was a crafty man, and did her sex no honor--but of his gambling,
his brawling, his unsaintliness. He said Ramon was a coward; and when
Dolores’ pale cheek reddened, he marked it again; and when she broke
at this, he told her a trumped-up story of his last battle under his
grave uncle. For Dolores, noble maiden, had not yet confessed her
life’s love to herself--how then to her confessor?

The Archbishop walked slowly home with her, Jacinta just behind, and
left her under that old stone scutcheon on the door. Del Torre and
Don Ramon lingered behind; and when they had passed her window, she
was sitting there, looking weary. The old General passed by, sweeping
off his hat, his eyes on the ground. He had been talking to the youth
of all the duties of his life and love; but Ramon was inattentive,
watching for her. As they passed her window Ramon lingered, daring a
word to Dolores through the iron bars. He asked her for a rose she
wore. She looked at him a moment, then gave it to him, with a message.
The Marquis saw her give the rose; he did not hear the message. Don
Ramon did; and his face turned the color of a winter leaf. As he walked
on, he crushed the rose, then threw it in the gutter. For the girl,
womanlike, had told the rival first.

That night Ramon intoxicated himself in some tavern brawl. He had a
companion with him, not of his own sex; and when another officer
reproached him with it, for his cousin, he swore that he would marry
her, and that she had been---- Then they fought a duel, and both were
wounded.




VII.


THE General heard of it the next morning, and it was even
the Archbishop brought him the news. The priest besought del Torre to
marry his ward, but he was obdurate; the crafty priest wrestled with
the soldier’s will all through that day, and neither conquered. But the
General’s face looked worn; he argued, only sadly, of the hot blood
of youth, of the hope in her love for the nephew, and of his bravery.
Then late in the day came the young officer, wounded, the bandage on
his breast half stanching the heart’s blood he had shed for her, and
besought the general not to give her to Don Ramon. Del Torre stood as
if at bay. “You love her too?” he cried.

“Ay, and would save her,” said the young man, faintly.

“You must protect her from this libertine,” then said the priest. For
he wished her to marry the one he thought she loved not.

“She loves him!” sighed the General.

“You must save her----”

“I will live with her, and guard her as my own----”

“You may not,” said the priest.

“I am her guardian----”

“You may not--you must marry her.”

“I am old and she is young----”

“The holy Church demands it!”

“I love her not--I----” the lie stuck in his lips.

Late in the afternoon del Torre went to see Dolores. She was at vesper
service, and he waited until she came back, pale. He began to speak. “I
have heard all,” she interrupted; “Jacinta told me.” And again he saw
her blush.

Del Torre groaned; he turned aside. Then he strode back to her, his
sabre clanking as he walked. “God forgive me if I err. Dolores, you may
not marry this man--you--you must--Señorita Condesa, will you marry me?”

Dolores looked up; she had been red, she was now pale. So blushes lie.

“Santissima Maria,” she said, below her breath.

“The Church--the Archbishop--demand it,” del Torre hurried on, not
looking at her, for he heard her exclamation. “I love you--well
enough--to wed you.” The soldier’s voice broke, too feeble now to cry a
charge. He never saw her look at him. God pardon him for looking down.

“You love me--well enough to wed me----” She had turned red again, and
her voice was low. He looked, and saw it.

“I will keep you, and watch over you, Dolores, with my life. The Church
demands it--I am but a soldier--will you marry me?”

Her dark head was bowed, and the purple of her eyes he saw not.

“Yes,” she said; but, oh, so gravely, so coldly!

He bowed ceremoniously, and touched her hand to his lips; then he
turned and left the stone-walled tropic garden. And as his sabre
clanked in the passage-way, she threw herself on the hammock in a flood
of tears.

And that is how they were affianced.




VIII.


THE love of a man for a girl is perhaps different from any
other passion our souls on earth are tempered with. Daphnis and Chloe
are pretty, natural, charming to paint and write _vers de société_
about; but so simple as to be shallow, so natural as to be replaceable.
To Daphnis, we know that any other Chloe will be Chloe too. And they
are in reality selfish; they seek the consummation of their wishes:
he his, she hers. It may be the same human energy; but in the fierce,
almost blasphemous, self-abnegation of the man’s love, it seems as
different a manifestation as the earth-rending power of freezing
water from the swelling of a bud at spring. The man can renounce his
love; but he desires her well-being with a will to which murder is an
incident and the will divine but an obstacle to be overcome.

The Archbishop had told del Torre that his nephew had been married
already--secretly, but married--married to the woman who came to seek
him out at the camp. Against this wall del Torre’s will had been
beating in vain before his own betrothal to Dolores was announced. If
she _could_ not marry Ramon, it might, indeed, be best she married
him. But it was with a fierce suspicion he received his friends’
congratulations at his club and camp. Among his officers no other
look or accent mingled with an unaffected joy. But in the city, he
fancied--he was ever ready to fancy--among the young men, a shade of
irony in their congratulations on his happiness. Was he not so old!

Don Ramon heard of it from Jacinta. Jacinta was on the side of the
younger man. She looked upon del Torre’s gray hairs with fierce eyes.
Ramon’s liquid voice and peachy lip had fascinated this supple creature
of the forest. Don Ramon heard; and his own answer was characteristic.

“The old fool!”

Jacinta nodded impatiently. She asked him for a message back. He took
pen and paper and wrote:

  “SEÑORITA CONDESA: Thou lovest me. On the morning thou shalt
  wed Don Sebastian I kill him.

                                                  “RAMON DEL TORRE.”

He read it over; then he stopped and thought. His first impulse was to
boast; his second, to intrigue. He was not all tiger; something of the
serpent lay within the handsome youth.

“I will send it this evening,” he said to Jacinta. And in the evening
this is what he wrote:

  “SEÑORITA CONDESA: The Archbishop is my enemy and makes my
  uncle marry you. Have you confessed to him? Surely, you have loved me?
  On the day he marries you he shall kill your

                                                  “RAMON.”

This letter he sent. So he played upon the poor girl’s conscience, that
as a child she had given him a smile; and bragged even to her that he
had had her heart. This was Thursday, March 19, 1812. The marriage was
set for the 26th. Ramon went to the club, the café which served as
club to the aristocracy of Carácas, and announced publicly that his
uncle was forcing his ward to marry him against his will. The General,
when this story was brought to him, winced, but only replied: “My
nephew knows I cannot fight him; I must leave my honor to the kind
opinion of my friends.” This speech was repeated--“to the kindness of
my friends;” and that night a dozen young gentlemen called upon the
marquis and asked to be permitted to provoke Don Ramon. The General
refused it to all, with one wave of his hand. “I marry my ward for
family reasons; my nephew must be permitted to make what criticism he
chooses.”

Don Ramon then announced his uncle a coward, and promised to prevent
the marriage by force. Del Torre took no notice. Jacinta had taken
the letter to Dolores, but Ramon got no reply. After his last threat,
however, he received a call from a Jesuit priest, who was sent by the
Archbishop and hinted of the Inquisition. Then the young man was silent
for two days, and in devouring his rage he produced this letter to
Dolores:

  “DOLORES: Hast thou confessed? And why no answer to me?
                                        “For death (_para la muerte_),
                                                  “RAMON.”

To this Jacinta brought back a line:

  “I shall confess upon my wedding-day. My answer to my husband, with
  the message that your Honour” (V., only, in Spanish) “did not give.
                                        “DOLORES, CONDESA DE LUNA.”

For Ramon had never given the message that went with the rose.

All this was in Holy Week. Palm Sunday passed; the Wednesday came; Holy
Thursday was the day fixed for the wedding--by the Archbishop’s special
will.

Now, it must be remembered that in all this time del Torre had spoken
with Dolores face to face three times, and three times only. Each time
he had seen her he had mentioned his nephew’s name, and each time she
had changed color. He would have married her to Don Ramon could he
have done so; even now he had dared but for Ramon’s own conduct. But
all this time del Torre was in an agony of doubt, through which even
Ramon’s insults could not penetrate. He would have sent Dolores to a
convent, but the archbishop forbade it; the priest feared not Don Ramon
against Don Sebastian; perhaps, however, he feared him at the convent
doors. But all this time del Torre had seen Dolores twice a day, at
mass, where he went and gazed upon her, dim through incense.




IX.


ON Wednesday morning the Marquis del Torre had a last interview
with his bride. She was to go to her last maidenly confession on
that day; and he called early in the morning, in his uniform as
General of the Liberal army. When he came upon her she was all in white
and girt about with pearls. Pearls were in her dark hair, pearls in the
folds of her white dress, pearls in her neck, no other color about her
save the magic amethystine in her eyes. Her face was pale.

Del Torre bowed over her hand, then stood beside her. After the
greeting, he said:

“Señorita Dolores, I am still your guardian--I would only marry you to
make you happy. Do you think I can?” His lips were paler than hers, and
his voice sounded cold. She only answered:

“Quite sure, señor.”

“And the rose I saw you give my nephew--is it dead?”

Again the rush of color to her face; but, after a start, she answered,
“It is dead.” She stammered slightly, trying to say more; to relieve
her embarrassment he rose and left her. “Hasta mañaña!”

“Mañaña por la mañaña,” she answered, forcing brightness in her voice.
The marquis went out into the sunlight; he felt his heart as cold as
hers.

But again Dolores burst into tears; then, quickly drying them, she
wrote a letter and sealed it. Then she called Jacinta.

The Indian nurse came quickly, and as she stood looking at Dolores a
dog’s love was in her eyes. “This letter--the marquis must have it in
the morning,” said the countess.

“He shall have it--in the morning,” answered Jacinta. Then Dolores went
to her confessor. And Jacinta could not read the letter; so she took
it to Don Ramon first, and asked him what it was. And it was Don Ramon
read it, Jacinta looking on.

Then Ramon girt his sword about him, and went to mass.




X.


THE soldiers in Carácas march to mass and the service is
performed at beat of drum. At the muffled tap of a march the regiment
files in to fill the nave, and kneels, ringing their bayonets upon the
stones; the people fill the sides, and stand behind the columns on the
aisles. The General was there, as usual, but he could not see Dolores;
she was kneeling at a shrine upon one side, a shrine of Mary, Mother of
Pity. All the pictures and gold images were heavily draped in crape,
for it was Holy Week. The brazen trumpets of the military band sounded
through the Kyrie Eleison; the church was dark, for every woman was
in black until Good Friday, and the crape hangings shrouded close the
walls. Del Torre stood erect in his green uniform, but, save for his
figure, the nave was a mass of red and gold and glittering steel. He
looked for her; he looked back to the doors which were thrown back
inward; from the dark, shrouded church he looked through into the empty
square, blazing with the zenith sun of the equinox. Again a muffled
drumbeat, and the regiment knelt, with a rattle of their bayonets, upon
the stones; it was the elevation of the host, and he, too, knelt and
crossed himself.

When mass was over, the soldiers filed out first; as del Torre
followed, he met the wounded captain again, with bloodless cheeks. “You
are too pale to be out, sir,” said the General, almost lovingly, his
hand resting lightly on the other’s shoulder.

“Don Ramon is outside,” he answered.

“I have no fear--the youth is mad,” said del Torre.

It is the custom in Spanish America, now forgotten in old Spain, to
lead the holy images of the church about the streets, with a slow
processional, before Good Friday. As del Torre spoke, they found
themselves behind one of these. In this Church of Santa Teresia is a
famed old image of Christ bearing the Cross, brought two centuries
before from Spain. It is especially venerated by the merchants of
Carácas; large sums are subscribed by them each Easter time to dress
it up, thousands of dollars and doubloons. Behind this image now they
found themselves. Eight chanting priests, in mourning black and lilac,
bore it on either side, but the image was gay with beaten gold, borne
in a canopy of costly lace, a hundred tall wax candles giving light.
The priests move very slowly, scarce a step a minute, making stations
at each shrine, so that to bear these images from one church to another
may take half a day. Del Torre and the wounded officer could not, of
course, pass it; so that it was half an hour when they reached the open
air, and the square nearly emptied of the worshippers; del Torre heard
the distant band of the army down the mountain slope.

As they came out into the heat, he felt a slight shudder, like a quiver
of the earth, and thought it was the shock of seeing his nephew.
Don Ramon del Torre spoke loudly, disregarding the presence of the
bystanders, pressing rudely by the sacred shrine, and crying that the
old man would not fight.

“There stands the old man that will wed my cousin.”

“Mention not her name,” said General del Torre----

“I would kill him first, but that his old blood dare not spill itself
for her.”

“Mention not her name,” said del Torre----. Then Ramon’s voice hissed
louder.

“My cousin Dolores de Luna that has been my mistress----”

That night a Jesuit priest, leaving the King’s House, where he had
confessed Dolores, ran hastily to the Archbishop’s. While he was there,
another frightened messenger brought the news that Don Sebastian and
his nephew had been fighting on Calvareo. But Jacinta, crying, brought
the news to the Countess earlier, how Don Sebastian and Don Ramon at
last had met, and how the nephew lay full of wounds upon the Calvary,
literally cut in pieces, killed at his own uncle’s hands.




XI.


DOLORES spent the night before the wedding kneeling in the
little chapel of her dwelling. So we read that Eastern Catholics “lay
all that night in the form of a cross.” She was praying for her husband
that had been to be--perhaps praying that he might be still, praying
for light to see if there were sin in it. Perhaps she had remorses
of her own. She had known the dead man he had killed as a boy, bold,
reckless, wild; I suppose she had looked at him once or twice. A
Southern maiden’s glances return to torture her when they have led to
blood; prudent maids of other climes are chary of them for tradition of
some such reason.

Dolores never wept, but knelt there, dry-eyed, praying. In intervals
she thought, “Would he be well enough to come?” as she knew that he
was gravely wounded; but somehow she felt sure he would; and that if
this marriage-bond were sin, he would venture it for her sake. A
woman’s conscience rules her heart, even in Spain; but a man, even
Roman Catholic, will risk his own perdition to save her sorrow, or that
no sin be hers. She must save him, she must be the judge. And sunrise
found her pale but decided. Then she called Jacinta to her side, and
asked her if she had carried to her husband (so she called him) her
note.

Jacinta looked at her fiercely; but at the word “Husband,” started.
Then she said she had torn it up.

At the Countess’s look she quailed, and lied again. She had it still,
she said. Dolores bade her give it to him as he came from early mass.

Then Jacinta cried and told the truth. She admitted that she had given
it to Don Ramon.

Dolores heard this with the blood about her heart, but sat there
silent, while the Indian woman grovelled at her feet. It was her note,
then, that caused the duel.

Then mine, too, is the sin, she thought, not his alone; and this
thought gave her joy. But where was he? was he strong enough to come?
She took her writing-case and wrote an exact copy of her other note;
and this was what she had said, and Ramon had read, and then had fought
his uncle:

 “SEÑOR: The rose you asked of yesterday I gave Don Ramon; but
 the message that went with it was given him for you.
                              “MARIA JOESPHA DOLORES, CONDESA DE LUNA.”

As she finished writing, the General was announced. His face was
bloodless, but his wounds had been carefully dressed, so that the
bandages could not be seen. He knelt over her hand, though the kneeling
set them bleeding once again. But Dolores, timid only in her love,
still saw but remorse and duty in his eyes. With him he brought his own
priest, a priest from the Liberal army. “Pobra,” he said, “we must be
married early--early and privately.”

She sought his eyes timidly and tried to say it; to say what words
her note said in her hand. But she could not. She could only say, “I
know--I have heard,” and she clenched the letter closer in her hand.
She could not give it to him.

Del Torre’s face could not turn whiter. But he said: “Forgive me--only
your forgiveness I can ask. At noon, then?”

“At noon.” She saw him leave the house; then, then she turned and cried
to Jacinta: “Run, run, and give him this letter--at the Cathedral.”

And again, upon her wedding-morning, Dolores went to pray. She was
interrupted by a visit from the Archbishop. Some presentiment made her
rise in apprehension; and as she stood erect, she saw, through the
priest, the man. And she saw that he, too, had her secret; first the
lover, then the priest, had found it out.

“This marriage must not be,” said he.

“Holy Father, I have confessed yesterday.”

“This marriage must not be. You loved Don Ramon.”

Dolores’s lips curled. “I confessed, yesterday. I see you have been
told.”

“Yesterday ’twas a duty--to-day it is a sin. Thou lovest Ramon.”

Then Dolores rose to her full height and her blue eyes flamed like ice.
“Sebastian, the Liberador, him I love, in this life and the next; God
knows it, and Ramon knows it, and now may you, and soon, please God,
shall he!”

All forewarned that he was, the priest started at her vehemence. Fool
that he had been!

“He has murdered his nephew--and thou art the cause.”

The Countess was silent. All Catholic that she was, she had resolved to
appeal from his judgment to God’s.

“Thou wilt not obey?” said the priest.

Her lips half formed the word no.

“Then on thee and on him, on thy house I pronounce the curse of God.
Thy family shall have cause to remember this day, this Holy Thursday,
until it and both thy names shall have vanished from the earth.”

Scarcely had the Archbishop left the house when del Torre came. She
saw that he had not been to church. But she was married to him without
another word. “If he has not my note,” she thought, “he shall have it
soon.”

But before that night Jacinta, with the note in her hand, was buried
with ten thousand others behind the closed cathedral doors.




XII.


ON this Thursday, March 26, 1812, while the services of the
Hours of Agony were being celebrated in the great cathedral, in the
presence of ten thousand people, the mountains trembled and the earth
opened. The multitude pressed for the doors, but they opened inward,
and the thronging masses pressed them fast. At the second shock the
walls opened and the roof fell in. The Archbishop and many priests were
buried at the altar. Thirty thousand people are said to have perished.
Many were swallowed in the chasm that opened on the mountain-side, like
rents in a bulging sail bursted in a gale. No stone houses in Carácas
more than one-story high were standing on that night--except the old
Spanish castle where, in the tower-room, Dolores sat watching for her
husband.

Through all that night del Torre worked amid the ruins. At dawn he
was brought home insensible, fainting from his labors, bleeding at his
opened wounds. Dolores met him at the door, and led the bearers to the
room that should have been their bridal-room. There he was laid, and
lay delirious many weeks with fever. Dolores never left his side.

The Archbishop was known to have been killed. Jacinta, the bride knew,
must have perished too. The priest that had married them stayed with
her; but Dolores, though brave enough to sin, was not false to her
faith. The over-wrought heart of the poor girl and great noblewoman
connected all that had happened with what she deemed her sins--firstly,
that she had caused her cousin’s death, her husband’s crime, but
chiefly that she had braved the Church, and the curse its head, now
dead, had launched upon her and upon Carácas. That their house alone
was standing seemed only to mark them guilty.

Dolores was a noble heart, and did not falter in her course. She had
followed love, she had married him she loved; his wife she was, his
wife she would remain. But she sought no soothing palliation from the
friendly priest. She went to no confession; in all her life she never
would confess herself, seek absolution again. Excommunicated she would
live, that the curse might rest on her and not on him.

But ah, how ardently she watched for Sebastian’s consciousness to come!
for his eyes to rest on hers again! She felt sure the coldness in them
now was gone. Delirious, he raved of her and of his love; he that never
called her but by titles in his life, now cried Dolores, Dolores, and
she held his hand and waited.

She bade the doctors tell her when his recovery was likely to come.
And then, when one evening his hands moved, and he closed his eyes and
slept, she sat there trembling, not daring to be beside him, but her
face turned away. That yearning cry--Dolores, Dolores, had been stilled
for hours; but the night passed and still he was asleep. Then, when it
was broad sunlight, she heard a sudden movement by the nurse, and the
priest began to pray in Latin, and her heart stood still. He sat up;
she retreated in the shadow, toward the door. His voice spoke; but
oh! how low, how weak--not as it had been in his dreaming; alas! this
was now his right mind. He saw not her; his eyes looked sanely out the
window, through the crowded city. “It was a sin to marry her,” he said.

She was carried fainting to her room within the tower, and there again
she waited. “Has he asked for me?” she ventured to ask, at night.

He had asked for my lady, and they told him she was ill. And the next
day again; and they had told him she was in her suite about the tower.
She dared not seek him now. And flowers came to her from him, but no
further speech. Thrice he sent his homage to her. He could not walk
yet, but he sent his homage to her. She asked to know when he could
walk; and they told her they would let her know. So, one afternoon,
they told her he might walk the next day; and all that night she passed
in prayer.

The next day she waited for his step upon the stone floor. It came
not; to her tears and prayers, it came not. Jacinta’s dead hand
still held close the note. She prayed--was it wrong to pray when
so unshrived?--to Maria Vergen de las Mercedes, but still it came
not. Her haughty Spanish breeding forbade her showing sorrow to her
servants, and they were cold and deferential to her. Jacinta? She was
dead--Dolores knew, but thought that she had given him her letter. She
had sinned, yes, but he was her husband.

The next day she asked the servant. The Señor General was gone. Gone?
without seeing her even? He had had to go to the wars; he had not
ventured to disturb my lady; he left a letter. A letter? she tore it
open, read it. It sent his respectful worship to “the Marquesa;” it
apologized for his illness; it prayed forgiveness from her for having
married her; it was done to save her name. It said no word of love; and
Sebastian Ruy del Torre was a gentleman: his love appeared not in his
letter. If she loved him not, he would not wound her by showing his. It
said no word of guilt. He would neither wound her by requiring love nor
by suggesting blame; but to Dolores’s morbid fancy it had a sense of
blame. It closed by speaking of his duty at the wars; of his country’s
freedom; perhaps, a hint of hers. Dolores clasped the white paper to
her breast, and, to immortal eyes its color was of blood. She read it
once again; and del Torre, had he been there, could have seen her heart
die in her eyes.




XIII.


WE must remember that Maria Josepha Dolores, Condesa del Torre
y Luna, was a lonely young girl, educated but from books, devoutedly
believing in a faith we like to think superstitious. Remember, please,
also, that she loved, and braved her Church for love, and had not, so
she thought, won his. She deemed her soul was damned; she knew her
heart was broken. Not that there were no days when she did dare hope;
no days in which she tried to frame a theory by which it still might
seem he cared for her; but she believed he was borne down by their
great guilt. And she resolved his soul, at least, would not be lost for
hers. “My lady Marquesa would have her apartments in all the house,”
the letter said. “My lady had but to command. A small room in the tower
was enough for him--he could but rarely be home from the wars. He
trusted, if his presence was painful, she would not see him,” etc.,
etc. And, after many months, when the General came back--his wife met
him not. The rooms of state were carefully prepared for him, and all
his suite; flowers, banquets were ready; all his retinue and hers, in
their joint blazonry, were in attendance. Only, strangely enough, just
that little tower-room was the one my lady Marchioness preferred. Would
he kindly yield it to her?

Of course, and the General sent her a rope of pearls. They almost broke
her resolution; but she met him not. The General only sighed; this was
all as he had known. The evil nephew, done to death by his own hand,
still had her heart. He sighed and his hair grew whiter. One rending
memory came over him, of the last time he had seen her eyes.

He could not know, as he rode homeward up the street, after his first
state visits, straining his eyes up to that tower-window frowning
so blankly, how late her own had left it--those eyes of purple-gray
that every beggar in Carácas soon knew well, save only he. Before the
next return his glory blazed abroad, and Bolivar came back with him.
Bolivar, the Liberator. All thoughtful preparation, all courtly care,
all a Spanish grandee’s splendor was spread forth to receive him in the
Casa Rey; but the châtelaine was never seen. It was not necessary to
explain her absence; such things get quickly known; it was, of course,
thought she had loved the cousin. And the strange Old-world Gothic
pride made her bearing, the honor of the house, del Torre’s silence,
only too easily intelligible to them. So the Marquis del Torre never
saw his bride on his returning home.

But, had he known it, he never opened a door that she had not vanished
through it. He never touched a flower she had not placed for him. He
never looked in a mirror her gray eyes had not just left. He never
touched a wine-glass to his lips that her lips had not kissed it. The
very missal that he read from had been warmed within her bosom.

O, ghosts, and mediums, and vulgar spirits of air! and stupid tables,
mirrors that are flattered with tales of second sight! Why did you
not hold a look of hers one moment longer? why did not the roses keep
a second longer her lips’ breath for him? Poor fables of visions in
the air, that could not draw the image of her eyes to his as he rode
up the street scarce a hundred mortal bodies’ breadths away! But they
never did; he never saw her, she saw him only as he rode away upon
his horse; and so for many--nay, not many (such poor slight power has
heaven)--not for many, years. And as his horse bore him away, she
came to the tower-window and watched him go--and there she sat weeks,
months, until the pennons flashed or the trumpet’s note announced to
her, waiting, that he was come again. For he always came in such guise,
announced with ceremony. And he did not dream her eyes had been at the
tower-window ever since. For their eyes never met.

But the people knew, and so they called her “Our Lady of the Tower.”
And Nuestra Doña del Torre is she called there still. And thus they
lived there alone within that great house, each for pity of the other
in courage, each for awe of love in silence; each so loving, so brave,
so silent, that the other never knew.




XIV.


“NUESTRA DOÑA DEL TORRE”--by that title, I fancy, she is known
in heaven. For in that city all the good that was worked was hers;
after the earthquake, then through siege and civil war, her heart
directed her handmaidens, ladies loving her did her soft work. Her own
life was but a gentle message. For she never but for the convent left
her tower-room. Thither, however, poor old men, children, troubled
girls, would come to see her.

All this time Bolivar was battling with the might of Spain, and del
Torre (del Torre y Luna now he always called himself, liking, at least,
to link his name with hers; but she had dropped her own name and
called herself del Torre alone--Maria Dolores del Torre) was Bolivar’s
captain. Years the war lasted. Once our General was captured in the
city; he came to Carácas at a time of war, when it was legal for the
Governor to capture him; he had heard some rumor that his wife was ill.
He would have been shot but that he escaped from gaol, and this so
easily that the prison doors seemed to turn of themselves. No youth, or
woman, or child in all Carácas but would have turned a traitor for our
lady.

Del Torre’s face looked old--Dolores knew it not. She never saw
him--except, perhaps, a distant figure on a horse. When he was out,
she roamed the house; when he came back she shut herself within her
apartments. He never returned, from the shortest absences, a walk
or a mass, without making formal announcement. He wondered only at
the flowers; the perfections of his banquets, the splendor of his
household, were for his guest and as it should be. At first del Torre
had hoped to see at least a handkerchief fly from her window, a
greeting or a wave of the hand, on his return. But it was always black
and blank when he saw it. At first, this cost him tears: a greeting
seemed so little--only courtesy! But afterward he only sighed; no man
should repine that events fulfil his expectations rather than his
hopes.

Their money grew apace. With part of hers Dolores built a church at Los
Teques, a property that had been her mother’s, not far from the city.
Half her time she spent there; and it stands there still, and is called
after the Vergen de las Mercedes--Our Lady of Pity--to whom alone
Dolores dared to pray. But the Church took her treasure and it kept her
secret. Sometimes, in God’s providence, even pity is withheld.

One’s heart beats quick to think what might have happened had she
ventured to confession--the priest who married them still was with
her, in the household, an honest priest, who loved del Torre, too. But
Rome, which knows how to be gentle as a mother, can also be as cruel as
the grave. So Dolores went on in building churches, and Don Sebastian
offered his brave heart wherever he saw a bullet fly for liberty. The
best work of the world is done by broken hearts.

One time that he came home, he found a medallion by his plate. It
was set with pearls, in tricolor enamel. He opened it, and it was a
miniature of her. Then once a rush of human blood bore all his barriers
of honor, duty, resolves of conduct, far away. He hastened through
the house to the tower, where she lived. He hastened--crying Dolores,
Dolores, as he had cried in his delirium. Her maid opened--not Jacinta,
but Jacinta’s daughter, now a woman. My Lady Marquesa had gone to the
convent at Los Teques for some weeks’ prayer.




XV.


AFTER this, del Torre’s body grew broken, with his heart.

It was the last campaign of liberation. The final battle was fought not
far from Los Teques, where the convent was; and the wall of the church
of the Vergen de las Mercedes was scarred with balls. The fight was
over, the country was free. And the General at last was killed.

Bolivar himself went with del Torre’s body to Carácas; our General’s
_corps d’armée_ were his pall-bearers. The news, of course, had
been sent to the city; the Governor had fled; the General’s tri-color
now, the red-white-green of Colombia, was floating over the Capitol.
All the town was gay with banners, merry with song. It had forgotten
the earthquake, and was now rebuilt, though lower down. The Casa Rey
now stood at the head of the principal street, which sloped from
it down the mountain side. And as the regiment escorting his body
debouched into this avenue and turned upward (as its dead leader had so
often done before), and the town came in view, there was a great hush
upon the people. For lo! Now, at last, the window of the tower was wide
open and the house bore all no black, but was festooned with laughing
tri-color. And the window of the tower was open, and there within stood
our Lady Dolores, in her white wedding laces, waving her hand.

She met them at the great door. Bolivar, and the officers who had been
with our General, started. For, as she stood there in her slender satin
gown, her eyes upon them, she was like a young girl. And her girlish
waist was bound about with pearls.

The fact was, she was seven-and-twenty. They placed his bier first in
the great room; but she would have it in hers, so in the tower-room
they placed it, with burning candles standing sentry now where she had
stood; and by its side were lilies--the flower of the Holy Ghost--and
then they left her. Then first, since her wedding-day, she looked upon
him, face to face, his eyes now dead to see. Their eyes so met. And
outside, from the city now again joyous, came the carillon of freedom
bells.




XVI.


THIS is the life story of Don Sebastian Ruy José Maria,
Marques del Torre y Luna; and of Maria Josepha Dolores del Torre,
Condesa de Luna, his wife; and of the old stone castle that alone the
earthquake left standing in the pleasant city of Carácas.

The Holy Catholic Church had alone their secret; and she kept it; and
now she has, laid up on earth, their treasure too. No longer such grim
motives vex their country; if she battles with herself, it is for money
or for acres of wide coffee land. Such cruel tales cannot be found
there now. But, perhaps, withal, some touch of noble life is vanished,
with that flag of blood and gold. Good cannot grow bravely without evil
in this world.

You may see the Casa Rey still standing in the sombre street, and the
empty tower window there. The Marquesa del Torre y Luna died, quite
old, more than a score of years ago. Her blue eyes are no longer there.
Perhaps they are in heaven, and now at last, “know not their love from
God.” The people of Carácas think so. Her eyes

  “Even than on this earth tenderer--
  While hopes and aims long lost with her,
  Stand round her image side by side,
  Like tombs of pilgrims that have died
  About the Holy Sepulchre.”




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

On page 6, the second occurrence of is has been removed.

On page 7, aquaintances has been changed to acquaintances.

On page 59, ’Ive has been changed to I’ve.

On page 71, Higginbothem has been changed to Higginbotham.

On page 85, Healey has been changed to Healy.

On page 91, pinetop has been changed to pine-top.

On page 128, inly has been changed to finally.

On page 147, Venezualen has been changed to Venezualan.

On page 186, was has been changed to were.

All dialect, archaic, varaint and LOTE has been left as typeset.



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