“What is the matter, Katy, dear?” she would say in a voice so full of natural melody and genuine sympathy, that it never failed to move Katy to the depths of her heart. Then Katy would cry more than ever, and fling her arms about the neck of dear, dear, _dear_ Cousin Isa, and lavish on her the tenderness of which her heart was full.
“O Cousin Isa! what must I do? I’m breaking poor Smith’s heart. You don’t know how much he loves me, and I’m afraid something dreadful will happen to him, you know. What shall I do?”
“I don’t think he cares much, Katy. He’s a bad man, I’m afraid, and doesn’t love you really. Don’t think any more of him.” For Isabel couldn’t find it in her heart to say to Katy just what she thought of Westcott.
“Oh! but you don’t know him,” Katy cries. “You don’t know him. He says that he does naughty things sometimes, but then he’s got such a tender heart. He made me promise I wouldn’t throw him over, as he called it, for his faults. He said he’d come to be good if I’d only keep on loving him. And I said I would. And I haven’t. Here’s more than a week now that he hasn’t been here, and I haven’t been to the store. And he said he’d go to sleep in the lake some night if I ever, ever proved false to him. And I lie awake nearly all night thinking how hard and cruel I’ve been to him. And oh!”–here Katy cried awhile–“and oh! I think such awful things sometimes,” she continued in a whisper broken by sobs. “You don’t know, Cousin Isa. I think how cold, how dreadful cold the lake must be! Oo-oo!” And a shudder shook her frame. “If poor, dear Smith were to throw himself in! What if he is there now?” And she looked up at Isa with staring eyes. “Do you know what an awful thing I heard about that lake once?” She stopped and shivered. “There are leeches in it–nasty, black worms–and one of them bit my hand once. And they told me that if a person should be drowned in Diamond Lake the leeches would–oo!–take all their blood, and their faces would be white, and not black like other drowned people’s faces. Oh! I can’t bear to think about poor Smith. If I could only write him a note, and tell him I love him just a little! But I told Albert I wouldn’t see him nor write to him. What shall I do? He mayn’t live till morning. They say he looks broken-hearted. He’ll throw himself into that cold lake to-night, maybe–and the leeches–the black worms–oo!–or else he’ll kill himself with that ugly pistol.”
It was in vain that Isabel talked to her, in vain that she tried to argue with a cataract of feeling. It was rowing against Niagara with a canoe-paddle. It was not wonderful, therefore, that before Albert got back, Isa Marlay found Katy reading little notes from Westcott, notes that ho had intrusted to one of his clerks, who was sent to the post-office three or four times a day on various pretexts, until he should happen to find Katy in the office. Then he would hand her the notes. Katy did not reply. She had promised Albert she wouldn’t. But there was no harm in her reading them, just to keep Smith from drowning himself among those black leeches in Diamond Lake.
Isabel Marlay, in her distressful sense of responsibility to Albert, could yet find no means of breaking up this renewed communication. In sheer desperation, she appealed to Mrs. Plausaby.
“Well, now,” said that lady, sitting in state with the complacent consciousness of a new and more stunning head-dress than usual, “I’ll tell you what it is, Isabel, I think Albert makes altogether too much fuss over Katy’s affairs. He’ll break the girl’s heart. He’s got notions. His father had. Deliver _me_ from notions! Just let Katy take her own course. Marryin’s a thing everybody must attend to personally for themselves. You don’t like to be meddled with, and neither does Albert. You won’t either of you marry to suit me. I have had my plans about you and Albert. Now, Isabel, Mr. Westcott’s a nice-looking man. With all his faults he’s a nice man. Cheerful and good-natured in his talk, and a good provider. He’s a store-keeper, too. It’s nice to have a storekeeper for a husband. I want Plausaby to keep store, so that I can get dresses and such things without having to pay for them. I felt mad at Mr. Westcott about his taking out his pistol so at Albert. But if Albert had let Mr. Westcott alone, I’m sure Smith wouldn’t a-touched him. But your folks with notions are always troubling somebody else. For my part, I shan’t meddle with Katy. Do you think this bow’s nice? Too low down, isn’t it?” and Mrs. Plausaby went to the glass to adjust it.
And so it happened that all Isa Marlay’s watching could not keep Westcott away. For the land-office regulations at that time required that Albert should live on his claim thirty days. This gave him the right to buy it at a dollar and a quarter an acre, or to exchange a land-warrant for it. The land was already worth two or three times the government price. But that thirty days of absence, broken only by one or two visits to his home, was enough to overturn all that Charlton had done in breaking up his sister’s engagement with Westcott. The latter knew how long Albert’s absence must be, and arranged his approaches to correspond. He gave her fifteen days to get over her resentment, and to begin to pity him on account of the stories of his incurable melancholy she would hear. After he had thus suffered her to dream of his probable suicide for a fortnight, he contrived to send her one little lugubrious note, confessing that he had been intoxicated and begging her pardon. Then he waited three days, days of great anxiety to her. For Katy feared lest her neglect to return an answer should precipitate Westcott’s suicide. But he did not need an answer. Her looks when she received the note had been reported to him. What could he need more? On the very evening after he had sent that contrite note to Katy, announcing that he would never drink again, he felt so delighted with what he had heard of its reception, that he treated a crony out of his private bottle as they played cards together in his room, and treated himself quite as liberally as he did his friend, got up in the middle of the floor, and assured his friend that he would be all right with his sweet little girl before the brother got back. By George! If folks thought he was going to commit suicide, they were fooled. Never broke his heart about a woman yet. Not much, by George! But when he set his heart on a thing, he generally got it. He! he! And he had set his heart on that little girl. As for jumping into the lake, any man was a fool to jump into the drink on account of a woman. When there were plenty of them. Large assortment constantly on hand. Pays yer money and takes yer ch’ice! Suicide? Not much, by George! he! he!
Hung his coat on a hickory limb,
Then like a wise man he jumped in,
My ole dad! My ole dad!
Wondered what tune Charlton would sing when he found himself beat? Guess ‘twould be:
Can’t stay in de wilderness.
In a few days, in a few days,
Can’t stay in de wilderness,
A few days ago.
Goin’ to pre-empt my claim, too. I’ve got a month’s leave, and I’ll follow him and marry that girl before he gets far. Bruddern and sistern, sing de ole six hundredth toon. Ahem!
I wish I was a married man,
A married man I’d be!
An’ ketch the grub fer both of us
A-fishin’ in the sea.
Big fish,
Little fish,
It’s all the same to me!
I got a organ stop in my throat. Can’t sing below my breath to save my life. He! he!
After three days had elapsed, Westcott sent a still more melancholy note to Katy. It made her weep from the first line to the last. It was full of heartbreak, and Katy was too unobserving to notice how round and steady and commercial the penmanship was, and how large and fine were the flourishes. Westcott himself considered it his masterpiece. He punched his crony with his elbow as he deposited it in the office, and assured him that it was the techin’est note ever written. It would come the sympathies over her. There was nothing like the sympathies to fetch a woman to terms. He knew. Had lots of experience. By George! You could turn a woman round yer finger if you could only keep on the tender side. Tears was what done it. Love wouldn’ keep sweet without it was pickled in brine. He! he! he! By George!
CHAPTER XX.
SAWNEY AND WESTCOTT.
David Sawney was delighted with the news that Albert Charlton and Smith Westcott had quarreled. “Westcott’s run of luck in that quarter’s broke. When a feller has a run of luck right along, and they comes a break, ‘ts all up with him. Broke luck can’t be spliced. It’s David Sawney’s turn now. Poor wind that blows no whar. I’ll bet a right smart pile I’ll pack the little gal off yet.”
But if an inscrutable Providence had omitted to make any Smith Westcotts, Dave Sawney wouldn’t have stood the ghost of a chance with Katy. His supreme self-complacency gave her no occasion to pity him. Her love was close of kin to her tender-heartedness, and all pity was wasted on Dave. He couldn’t have been more entirely happy than he was if he had owned the universe in fee simple.
However, Dave was resolved to try his luck, and so, soon after Albert’s departure, he blacked up his vast boots and slicked his hair, and went to Plausaby’s. He had the good luck to find Katy alone.
“Howdy! Howdy! Howdy git along? Lucky, ain’t I, to find you in? Haw! haw! I’m one of the luckiest fellers ever was born. Always wuz lucky. Found a fip in a crack in the hearth ‘fore I was three year old. ‘Ts a fack. Found a two-and-a-half gole piece wunst. Golly, didn’t I feel _some_! Haw! haw! haw! The way of’t wuz this.” But we must not repeat the story in all its meanderings, lest readers should grow as tired of it as Katy did; for Dave crossed one leg over the other, looked his hands round his knee, and told it with many a complacent haw! haw! haw! When he laughed, it was not from a sense of the ludicrous: his guffaw was a pure eruption of delighted self-conceit.
“I thought as how as I’d like to explain to you somethin’ that might ‘a’ hurt yer feelin’s, Miss Charlton. Didn’t you feel a little teched at sompin’?”
“No, Mr. Sawney, you never hurt my feelings.”
“Well, gals is slow to own up that they’re hurt, you know. But I’m shore you couldn’t help bein’, and I’m ever so sorry. Them Injin goin’-ons of mine wuz enough to ‘a’ broke your heart.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, my sellin’ out to Perritaut for ten thousand dollars, only I didn’t. Haw! haw!” and Dave threw his head back to laugh. “You had a right to feel sorter bad to think I would consent to marry a Injin. But ’tain’t every feller as’ll git ten thousand offered in five annooal payments; an’ I wanted you to understand ‘twan’t the Injin, ’twas the cash as reached me. When it comes to gals, you’re the posy fer me.”
Katy grew red, but didn’t know what to say or do.
“I heerd tell that that feller Westcott’d got his walkin’ papers. Sarved him right, dancin’ roun’ like a rang-a-tang, and jos’lin’ his keys and ten-cent pieces in his pocket, and sayin’ imperdent things. But I could ‘a’ beat him at talk the bes’ day he ever seed ef he’d on’y ‘a’ gi’n me time to think. I kin jaw back splendid of you gin me time. Haw! haw! haw! But he ain’t far–don’t never gin a feller time to git his thoughts gethered up, you know. He jumps around like the Frenchman’s flea. Put yer finger on him an’ he ain’t thar, and never wuz. Haw! haw! haw! But jest let him stay still wunst tell I get a good rest on him like, and I’ll be dog-on’d ef I don’t knock the hine sights offen him the purtiest day he ever seed! Haw! haw! haw! Your brother Albert handled him rough, didn’t he? Sarved him right. I say, if a man is onrespectful to a woman, her brother had orter thrash him; and your’n done it. His eye’s blacker’n my boot. And his nose! Haw! haw! it’s a-mournin’ fer his brains! Haw I haw! haw! And he feels bad bekase you cut him, too. Jemently, ef he don’ look like ‘s ef he’d kill hisself fer three bits.”
Katy was so affected by this fearful picture of poor, dear Smith’s condition, that she got up and hurried out of the room to cry.
“What on airth’s the matter?” soliloquized Dave. “Bashful little creeter, I ‘low. Thought I wuz a-comin to the p’int, maybe. Well, nex’ time’ll do. Haw! haw! Young things is cur’us now, _to_ be shore. Mout’s well be a gittin’ on, I reckon. Gin her time to come round, I ‘low.”
With such wooing, renewed from time to time, the clumsy and complacent Dave whiled away his days, and comforted himself that he had the persimmon-tree all to himself, as he expressed it. Meanwhile, the notes of Westcott were fast undoing all that Albert had done to separate him from “the purty little girl.”
[Illustration: “WHAT ON AIRTH’S THE MATTER?”]
Of course, when the right time came, he happened to meet Katy on the street, and to take off his hat and make a melancholy bow, the high-tragedy air of which confirmed Katy’s suspicions that he meant to commit suicide at the first opportunity. Then he chanced to stop at the gate, and ask, in a tone sad enough to have been learned from the gatherers of cold victuals, if he might come in. In three days more, he was fully restored to favor and to his wonted cheerfulness. He danced, he sang, he chirruped, he rattled his keys, he was the Privileged Infant once more. He urged Katy to marry him at once, but her heart was now rent by pity for Albert and by her eager anxiety lest he should do something desperate when he heard of her reconciliation. She trembled every day at thought of what might happen when he should return.
“Goin’ to pre-empt in a few days, Katy. Whisky Jim come plaguey near to gittin’ that claim. He got Shamberson on his side, and if Shamberson’s brother-in-law hadn’t been removed from the Land Office before it was tried, he’d a got it. I’m going to pre-empt and build the cutest little bird’s nest for you.
“If I was young and in my prime,
I’d lead a different life,
I’d save my money, and buy me a farm, Take Dinah for my wife.
Oh! carry me back–
“Psha! Dat dah ain’t de toon, bruddern. Ahem!
“When you and I get married, love,
How jolly it will be!
We’ll keep house in a store-box, then, Just two feet wide by three!
Store-box!
Band-box!
All the same to me!
“And when we want our breakfast, love, We’ll nibble bread and chee–
It’s good enough for you, love,
And most too good for me!
White bread!
Brown bread!
All the same to me!
“Dog-on’d ef ’tain’t. White bread’s good as brown bread. One’s jest as good as the other, and a good deal better. It’s all the same to me, and more so besides, and something to carry. It’s all the same, only ’tain’t. Ahem:
“Jane and Sukey and July Ann–
Too brown, too slim, too stout!
You needn’t smile on this ‘ere man, Git out! git out! git out!
But the maiden fair
With bonny brown hair–
Let all the rest git out!”–
“Get out yourself!” thundered Albert Charlton, bursting in at that moment. “If you don’t get your pack of tomfoolery out of here quick, I’ll get it out for you,” and he bore down on Westcott fiercely.
“I beg pardon, Mr. Charlton. I’m here to see your sister with her consent and your mother’s, and–“
“And I tell you,” shouted Albert, “that my sister is a little girl, and my mother doesn’t understand such puppies as you, and I am my sister’s protector, and if you don’t get out of here, I’ll kill you if I can.”
“Albert, don’t be so quarrelsome,” said Mrs. Plausaby, coming in at the instant. “I’m sure Mr. Westcott’s a genteel man, and good-natured to Katy, and–“
“Out! out! I say, confound you! or I’ll break your empty head,” thundered Charlton, whose temper was now past all softening. “Put your hand on that pistol, if you dare,” and with that he strode at the Privileged Infant with clenched fist, and the Privileged Infant prudently backed out the door into the yard, and then, as Albert kept up his fierce advance, the Privileged Infant backed out of the gate into the street. He was not a little mortified to see the grinning face of Dave Sawney in the crowd about the gate, and to save appearances, he called back at Albert, who was returning toward the house, that he would settle this affair with him yet. But he did not know how thoroughly Charlton’s blood was up.
“Settle it?” said Albert–yelled Albert, I should say–turning back on him with more fury than ever. “Settle it, will you? I’ll settle it right here and now, you cowardly villain! Let’s have it through, now,” and he walked swiftly at Westcott, who walked away; but finding that the infuriated Albert was coming after him, the Privileged Infant hurried on until his retreat became a run, Westcott running down street, Charlton hotly pursuing him, the spectators running pell-mell behind, laughing, cheering, and jeering.
“Don’t come back again if you don’t want to get killed,” the angry Charlton called, as he turned at last and went toward home.
“Now, Katy,” he said, with more energy than tenderness, as he entered the house, “if you are determined to marry that confounded rascal, I shall leave at once. You must decide now. If you will go East with me next week, well and good. If you won’t give up Smith Westcott, then I shall leave you now forever.”
Katy couldn’t bear to be the cause of any disaster to anybody; and just at this moment Smith was out of sight, and Albert, white and trembling with the reaction of his passion, stood before her. She felt, somehow, that she had brought all this trouble on Albert, and in her pity for him, and remorse for her own course, she wept and clung to her brother, and begged him not to leave her. And Albert said: “There, don’t cry any more. It’s all right now. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. There, there!” There is nothing a man can not abide better than a woman in tears.
CHAPTER XXI.
ROWING.
To get away with Katy immediately. These were the terms of the problem now before Albert His plan was to take her to visit friends at the East, and to keep her there until Westcott should pass out of her mind, or until she should be forgotten by the Privileged Infant. This was not Westcott’s plan of the campaign at all. He was as much bent on securing Katy as he could have been had he been the most constant, devoted, and disinterested lover. He would have gone through fire and flood. The vindictive love of opposition and lust for triumph is one of the most powerful of motives. Men will brave more from an empty desire to have their own way, than they could be persuaded to face by the most substantial motives.
Smith Westcott was not a man to die for a sentiment, but for the time he had the semblance of a most devoted lover. He bent everything to the re-conquest of Katy Charlton. His pride served him instead of any higher passion, and he plotted by night and managed by day to get his affairs into a position in which he could leave. He meant to follow Albert and Katy, and somewhere and somehow, by working on Katy’s sympathies, to carry off the “stakes,” as he expressed it. He almost ceased trifling, and even his cronies came to believe that he was really in love. They saw signs of intense and genuine feeling, and they mistook its nature. Mrs. Ferret expressed her sympathy for him–the poor man really loved Kate, and she believed that Kate had a right to marry anybody she pleased. She did not know what warrant there was in Scripcherr for a brother’s exercising any authority. She thought Mrs. Plausaby ought to have brought up her son to have more respect for her authority, and to hold Scripcherral views. If he were her son, now! What she would have done with him in that case never fully appeared; for Mrs. Ferret could not bring herself to complete the sentence. She only said subjunctively: “If he were _my_ son, now!” Then she would break off and give her head two or three awful and ominous shakes. What would have happened if such a young man as Albert had been her son, it would be hard to tell. Something unutterably dreadful, no doubt.
Even the charms of Miss Minorkey were not sufficient to detain Albert in his eager haste and passionate determination to rescue Katy. But to go, he must have money; to get money, he must collect it from Plausaby, or at least get a land-warrant with which he could pre-empt his claim. Then he would mortgage his land for money to pay his traveling expenses. But it was so much easier to lend money to Plausaby, Esq., than it was to collect it. Plausaby, Esq., was always just going to have the money; Plausaby, Esq., had ever ready so many excuses for past failure, and so many assurances of payment in the immediate future, that Charlton was kept hoping and waiting in agony from week to week. He knew that he was losing ground in the matter of Westcott and Katy. She was again grieving over Smith’s possible suicide, was again longing for the cheerful rattle of flattery and nonsense which rendered the Privileged Infant so diverting even to those who hated him, much more to her who loved him.
Albert’s position was the more embarrassing that he was obliged to spend a part of his time on his claim to maintain a residence. One night, after having suffered a disappointment for the fifth time in the matter of Plausaby and money, he was walking down the road to cool his anger in the night air, when he met the Inhabitant of the Lone Cabin, again.
“Well, Gray,” he said, “how are you? Have you written any fresh verses lately?”
“Varses? See here, Mr. Charlton, do you ‘low this ‘ere’s a time fer varses?”
“Why not?”
“_To_ be shore! Why not? I should kinder think yer own heart should orter tell you. You don’ know what I’m made of. You think I a’n’t good fer nothin’ but varses. Now, Mr. Charlton, I’m not one of them air fellers as lets theirselves all off in varses that don’ mean nothin’. What my pomes says, that my heart feels. And that my hands does. No, sir, my po’try ‘s like the corn crap in August. It’s laid by. I ha’n’t writ nary line sence I seed you afore. The fingers that holds a pen kin pull a trigger.”
“What do you mean, Gray?”
“This ‘ere,” and he took out a pistol. “I wuz a poet; now I’m a gardeen angel. I tole you I wouldn’ do nothin’ desperate tell I talked weth you. That’s the reason I didn’ shoot him t’other night. When you run him off, I draw’d on him, and he’d a been a gone sucker ef’t hadn’ been fer yore makin’ me promise t’other day to hold on tell I’d talked weth you. Now, I’ve talked weth you, and I don’t make no furder promises. Soon as he gits to makin’ headway agin, I’ll drap him.”
It was in vain that Charlton argued with him. Gray said life wurn’t no ‘count no how; he had sot out to be a Gardeen Angel, and he wuz agoin’ through. These ‘ere Yankees tuck blam’d good keer of their hides, but down on the Wawbosh, where he come from, they didn’t valley life a copper in a thing of this ‘ere sort. Ef Smith Westcott kep’ a shovin’ ahead on his present trail, he’d fetch up kinder suddent all to wunst, weth a jolt.
After this, the dread of a tragedy of some sort did not decrease Albert’s eagerness to be away. He began to talk violently to Plausaby, and that poor gentleman, harassed now by a suit brought by the town of Perritaut to set aside the county-seat election, and by a prosecution instituted against him for conspiracy, and by a suit on the part of the fat gentleman for damages on account of fraud in the matter of the two watery lots in block twenty-six, and by much trouble arising from his illicit speculation in claims–this poor Squire Plausaby, in the midst of this accumulation of vexations, kept his temper sweet, bore all of Albert’s severe remarks with serenity, and made fair promises with an unruffled countenance. Smith Westcott had defeated Whisky Jim in his contest for the claim, because the removal of a dishonest receiver left the case to be decided according to the law and the regulations of the General Land Office, and the law gave the claim to Westcott. The Privileged Infant, having taken possession of Jim’s shanty, made a feint of living in it, having moved his trunk, his bed, his whisky, and all other necessaries to the shanty. As his thirty days had expired, he was getting ready to pre-empt; the value of the claim would put him in funds, and he proposed, now that his blood was up, to give up his situation, if he should find it necessary, and “play out his purty little game” with Albert Charlton. It was shrewdly suspected, indeed, that if he should leave the Territory, he would not return. He knew nothing of the pistol which the Gardeen Angel kept under his wing for him, but Whisky Jim had threatened that he shouldn’t enjoy his claim long. Jim had remarked to several people, in his lofty way, that Minnesoty wuz a healthy place fer folks weth consumption, but a dreffle sickly one fer folks what jumped other folks’s claims when they wuz down of typus. And Jim grew more and more threatening as the time of Westcott’s pre-emption drew near. While throwing the mail-bag off one day at the Metropolisville post-office he told Albert that he jest wished he knowed which mail Westcott’s land-warrant would come in. He wouldn’t steal it, but plague ef he wouldn’t heave it off into the Big Gun River, accidentally a purpose, ef he had to go to penitensh’ry fer it.
But after all his weary and impatient waiting on and badgering of Plausaby, Albert got his land-warrant, and hurried off to the land-office, made his pre-emption, gave Mr. Minorkey a mortgage with a waiver in it, borrowed two hundred dollars at three per cent a month and five after maturity, interest to be settled every six months.
Then, though it was Friday evening, he would have packed everything and hurried away the next morning; but his mother interposed her authority. Katy couldn’t be got ready. What was the use of going to Red Owl to stay over Sunday? There was no boat down Sunday, and they could just as well wait till Monday, and take the Tuesday boat, and so Albeit reluctantly consented to wait.
But he would not let Katy be out of his sight. He was determined that in these last hours of her stay in the Territory, Smith Westcott should not have a moment’s opportunity for conversation with her. He played the tyrannical brother to perfection. He walked about the house in a fighting mood all the time, with brows drawn down and fist ready to clench.
He must have one more boat-ride with Helen Minorkey, and he took Katy with him, because he dared not leave her behind. He took them both in the unpainted pine row-boat which belonged to nobody in particular, and he rowed away across the little lake, looking at the grassy-green shores on the one side, and at the basswood trees that shadowed the other. Albert had never had a happier hour. Out in the lake he was safe from the incursions of the tempter. Rowing on the water, he relaxed the strain of his vigilance; out on the lake, with water on every side, he felt secure. He had Katy, sweet and almost happy; he felt sure now that she would be able to forget Westcott, and be at peace again as in the old days when he had built play-houses for the sunny little child. He had Helen, and she seemed doubly dear to him on the eve of parting. When he was alone with her, he felt always a sense of disappointment, for he was ever striving by passionate speeches to elicit some expression more cordial than it was possible for Helen’s cool nature to utter. But now that Katy’s presence was a restraint upon him, this discord between the pitch of his nature and of hers did not make itself felt, and he was satisfied with himself, with Helen, and with Katy. And so round the pebbly margin of the lake he rowed, while they talked and laughed. The reaction from his previous state of mental tension put Albert into a sort of glee; he was almost as boisterous as the Privileged Infant himself. He amused himself by throwing spray on Katy with his oars, and he even ventured to sprinkle the dignified Miss Minorkey a little, and she unbent enough to make a cup of her white palm and to dip it into the clear water and dash a good, solid handful of it into the face of her lover. She had never in her life acted in so undignified a manner, and Charlton was thoroughly delighted to have her throw cold water upon him in this fashion. After this, he rowed down to the outlet, and showed them where the beavers had built a dam, and prolonged his happy rowing and talking till the full moon came up out of the prairie and made a golden pathway on the ripples. Albert’s mind dwelt on this boat-ride in the lonely year that followed. It seemed to him strange that he could have had so much happiness on the brink of so much misery. He felt as that pleasure party did, who, after hours of happy sport, found that they had been merry-making in the very current of the great cataract.
There are those who believe that every great catastrophe throws its shadow before it, but Charlton was never more hopeful than when he lifted his dripping oars from the water at half-past nine o’clock, and said: “What a grand ride we’ve had! Let’s row together again to-morrow evening. It is the last chance for a long time.”
CHAPTER XXII.
SAILING.
On the Saturday morning after this Friday evening boat-ride, Charlton was vigilant as ever, and yet Saturday was not a dangerous day. It was the busy day at the Emporium, and he had not much to fear from Westcott, whose good quality was expressed by one trite maxim to which he rigidly adhered. “Business before pleasure” uttered the utmost self-denial of his life. He was fond of repeating his motto, with no little exultation in the triumph he had achieved over his pleasure-loving disposition. To this fidelity to business he owed his situation as “Agent,” or head-clerk, of the branch store of Jackson, Jones & Co. If he could have kept from spending money as fast as he made it, he might have been a partner in the firm. However, he rejoiced in the success he had attained, and, to admiring neophytes who gazed in admiration on his perilous achievement of rather reckless living and success in gaining the confidence of his employers, he explained the marvel by uttering his favorite adage in his own peculiar style: “Business before pleasure! By George! That’s the doctrine! A merchant don’t care how fast you go to the devil out of hours, if you keep his business straight. Business before pleasure! That’s the ticket! He! he! By George!”
When evening came, and Charlton felt that he had but one more day of standing guard, his hopes rose, he talked to Isabel Marlay with something of exultation. And he thought it due to Miss Marlay to ask her to make one of the boating-party. They went to the hotel, where Miss Minorkey joined them. Albert found it much more convenient walking with three ladies than with two. Isa and Katy walked on arm-in-arm, and left Albert to his _tete-a-tete_ with Helen. And as Sunday evening would be the very last on which he should see her before leaving for the East, he found it necessary to walk slowly and say much. For lovers who see each other a great deal, have more to say the more they are together.
At the lake a disappointment met them. The old pine boat was in use. It was the evening of the launching of the new sail-boat, “The Lady of the Lake,” and there was a party of people on the shore. Two young men, in a spirit of burlesque and opposition, had seized on the old boat and had chalked upon her bow, “The Pirate’s Bride.” With this they were rowing up and down the lake, and exciting much merriment in the crowd on the shore.
Ben Towle, who was one of the principal stockholders in “The Lady of the Lake,” and who had been suspected of a tender regard for Isabel Marlay, promptly offered Albert and his party seats in the boat on her first trip. There were just four vacancies, he said. The three ladies had stepped aboard, and Albert was following, when the ex-sailor who held the rudder touched his arm and said, “I don’t think it’s safe, Mr. Charlton, fer nobody else to git in. She’s got ‘leven now, and ef the wind freshens, twelve would be dangerous.”
“Oh! I’ll stay out!” said Albert, retreating.
“Come, Albert, take my place,” said Towle. “You’re welcome to it.”
“No, I won’t, Ben; you sit still, and I’ll stand on the shore and cheer.”
Just as the boat was about to leave her moorings, Smith Westcott came up and insisted on getting in.
“‘Twon’t do, Mr. Wes’cott. ‘Ta’n’t safe,” said the helmsman. “I jest begged Mr. Charlton not to go. She’s got a full load now.”
“Oh! I don’t weigh anything. Lighter’n a feather. Only an infant. And besides, I’m going anyhow, by George!” and with that he started to get aboard. But Albert had anticipated him by getting in at the other end of the boat and taking the only vacant seat. The Privileged Infant scowled fiercely, but Charlton affected not to see him, and began talking in a loud tone to Ben Towle about the rigging. The line was thrown off and the boat pushed out, the wind caught the new white sail, and the “Lady of the Lake” started along in the shallows, gradually swinging round toward the open water. Soon after her keel had ceased to grind upon the gravel, Albert jumped out, and, standing over boot-top in water, waved his hat and wished them a pleasant voyage, and all the ladies in the boat waved their handkerchiefs at him, appreciating his efforts to keep the boat from being overloaded, but not thinking of the stronger motive Charlton had for keeping Smith Westcott ashore. They could not know how much exultation Albert felt as he sat down on the green grass and poured the water from his boots.
There was a fine breeze, the boat sailed admirably, the party aboard laughed and talked and sang; their voices made merry music that reached the shore. The merry music was irritating discord to the ears of Westcott, it made him sweur bitterly at Charlton. I am afraid that it made Charlton happy to think of Westcott swearing at him. There is great comfort in being the object of an enemy’s curses sometimes–When the enemy is down, and you are above and master. I think the consciousness that Westcott was swearing at him made even the fine sunset seem more glorious to Charlton. The red clouds were waving banners of victory.
But in ten minutes the situation had changed. Albert saw Westcott walking across the beaver-dam at the lower end of the lake, and heard him hallooing to the young men who were rowing the “Pirate’s Bride” up and down and around the “Lady of the Lake,” for the ugly old boat was swiftest. The Pirate’s Bride landed and took Westcott aboard, and all of Albert’s rejoicing was turned to cursing, for there, right before his eyes, the Pirate’s Bride ran her brown hull up alongside the white and graceful Lady of the Lake, and Smith Westcott stepped from the one to the other. The beauty of the sunset was put out. The new boat sailed up and down the little lake more swiftly and gracefully than ever as the breeze increased, but Albert hated it.
By some change or other in seats Westcott at last got alongside Katy. Albert distinctly saw the change made, and his anger was mingled with despair. For Isabel and Helen were in the other end of the boat, and there were none to help. And so on, on, in the gray dusk of the evening, the boat kept sailing from one end of the lake to the other, and as it passed now and then near him, he could see that Smith was in conversation with little Katy.
“You needn’t worry, Mr. Charlton, I’ll fix him.” It was the voice of the Guardian Angel. “I’ll fix him, shore as shootin’.” And there he stood looking at Albert. For the first time now it struck Albert that George Gray was a little insane. There was a strange look in his eyes. If he should kill Westcott, the law would not hold him accountable. Nobody would be accountable, and Katy would be saved.
But in a moment Albert’s better feeling was uppermost. The horribleness of murder came distinctly before him. He shuddered that he should have entertained the thought of suffering it.
“You see, Mr. Charlton,” said Gray, with eyes having that strange mysterious look that only belongs to the eyes of people who are at least on the borders of insanity, “you see this ‘ere pistol’s got five bar’ls, all loadened. I tuck out the ole loads las’ night and filled her up weth powder what’s shore to go off. Now you leave that air matter to me, will you?”
“Let me see your revolver,” said Albert.
Gray handed it to him, and Charlton examined it a minute, and then, with a sudden resolution, he got to his feet, ran forward a few paces, and hurled the pistol with all his might into the lake.
“Don’t let us commit murder,” he said, turning round and meeting the excited eyes of the half-insane poet.
“Well, maybe you’re right, but I’ll be hanged ef I think it’s hardly far and squar and gentlemanly to wet a feller’s catridges that-a-way.”
“I had to,” said Albert, trembling. “If I hadn’t, you or I would have been a murderer before morning.”
“Maybe so, but they ain’t nothin else to be done. Ef you don’t let me kill the devil, why, then the devil will pack your sister off, and that’s the end on’t.”
The moon shone out, and still the boat went sailing up and down the lake, and still the party in the boat laughed and talked and sang merry songs, and still Charlton walked up and down the shore, though almost all the rest of the spectators had gone, and the Poet sat down in helpless dejection. And still Smith Westcott sat and talked to Katy. What he said need not be told: how, while all the rest laughed and sang, the Privileged Infant was serious; and how he appealed to Katy’s sympathies by threatening to jump off into the lake; and how he told her that they must be married, and have it all over at once. Then, when it was all over, Albert wouldn’t feel bad about it any more. Brothers never did. When he and Albert should get to be brothers-in-law, they’d get on splendidly. By George! Some such talk as this he had as they sailed up and down the lake. Just what it was will never be known, whether he planned an elopement that very night, or on Sunday night, or on the night which they must pass in Red Owl Landing, nobody knows. Isabel Marlay, who saw all, was sure that Smith had carried all his points. He had convinced the sweet and trusting Katy that an immediate marriage would be best for Brother Albert as well as for themselves.
And as the boat sailed on, tacking to and fro, even the pilot got over his anxiety at the overloading which had taken place when Westcott got in. The old tar said to Towle that she carried herself beautifully.
Five minutes after he made the remark, while Westcott was talking to Katy, and playfully holding his fingers in the water as he leaned over the gunwale that almost dipped, there came a flaw in the wind, and the little boat, having too much canvas and too much loading, careened suddenly and capsized.
There was a long, broken, mingled, discordant shriek as of a dozen voices on different keys uttering cries of terror and despair. There was the confusion of one person falling over another; there was the wild grasping for support, the seizing of each other’s garments and arms, the undefined and undefinable struggle of the first desperate minute after a boat has capsized, the scream that dies to a gurgle in the water and then breaks out afresh, louder and sharper than before, and then is suddenly smothered into a gurgle again. There were all these things, there was an alarm on the shore, a rush of people, and then there came stillness, and those minutes of desperate waiting, in which the drowning people cling to rigging and boat, and test the problem of human endurance. It is a race between the endurance of frightened, chilled, drowning people, and the stupid lack of presence of mind of those on shore. All the inmates of the boat got hold of something, and for a minute all their heads were out of water. Their eyes were so near to the water, that not even the most self-possessed of them could see what exertions were being made by people on shore to help them. Thus they clung a minute, no one saying anything, when Jane Downing, who held to the rigging at some distance from the boat, paralyzed by fear, let go, and slowly sank out of sight, saying never a word as she went down, but looking with beseeching eyes at the rest, who turned away as the water closed over her, and held on more tenaciously than ever, and wondered whether help ever would reach them. And this was only at the close of the first minute. There were twenty-nine other minutes before help came.
CHAPTER XXIII.
SINKING.
Isabel Marlay’s first care had been to see that little Katy had a good hold. Helen Minorkey was quite as self-possessed, but her chief care was to get into a secure position herself. Nothing brings out character more distinctly than an emergency such as this. Miss Minorkey was resolute and bent on self-preservation from the first moment. Miss Marlay was resolute, but full of sympathy for the rest. With characteristic practical sense, she did what she could to make herself and those within her reach secure, and then with characteristic faith she composed her mind to death if it should come, and even ventured with timid courage to exhort Katy and Miss Minorkey to put their trust in Christ, who could forgive their sins, and care for them living or dying. Even the most skeptical of us respect a settled belief in a time of trial. There was much broken praying from others, simply the cry of terror-stricken spirits. In all ages men have cried in their extremity to the Unseen Power, and the drowning passengers in Diamond Lake uttered the same old cry. Westcott himself, in his first terror, prayed a little and swore a little by turns.
The result of self-possession in the case of Isa Marlay and Helen Minorkey was the same. They did not waste their strength. When people drown, it is nearly always from a lack of economy of force. Here was poor little Katy so terrified at thoughts of drowning, and of the cold slimy bed at the bottom of the lake, and more than all at thoughts of the ugly black leeches that abounded at the bottom, that she was drawing herself up head and shoulders out of the water all the time, and praying brokenly to God and Brother Albert to come and help them. Isa tried to soothe her, but she shuddered, and said that the lake was so cold, and she knew she should drown, and Cousin Isa, and Smith, and all of them. Two or three times, in sheer desperation, little Katy let go, but each time Isa Marlay saved her and gave her a better hold, and cheered her with assurances that all would be well yet.
While one party on the shore were building a raft with which to reach the drowning people, Albert Charlton and George Gray ran to find the old boat. But the young men who had rowed in it, wishing to keep it for their own use, had concealed it in a little estuary on the side of the lake opposite to the village, so that the two rescuers were obliged to run half the circumference of the lake before they found it. And even when they reached it, there were no oars to be found, the party rowing last having carefully hidden them in the deep grass of the slough by the outlet. George Gray’s quick frontiersman’s instinct supplied the deficiency with sticks broken from a fallen tree. But with the time consumed in finding the boat, and the time lost in searching for the oars, and the slowness of the progress made in rowing with these clumsy poles, and the distance of the boat’s starting-point from the scene of the disaster, the raft had greatly the advantage of them, though Charlton and Gray used their awkward paddles with the energy of desperation. The wrecked people had clung to their frail supports nearly a quarter of an hour, listening to the cries and shouts of their friends ashore, unable to guess what measures were being taken for their relief, and filled with a distrustful sense of having been abandoned by God and man. It just then occurred to Westcott, who had recovered from his first fright, and who for some time had neither prayed to God nor cursed his luck, that he might save himself by swimming. In his boyish days, before he had weakened his texture by self-indulgence and shattered his nerves by debauchery, he had been famous for his skill and endurance in the water, and it now occurred to him that he might swim ashore and save Katy Charlton at the same time. It is easy enough for us to see the interested motives he had in proposing to save little Katy. He would wipe out the censure sure to fall on him for overloading the boat, he would put Katy and her friends under lasting obligations to him, he would win his game. It is always easy to see the selfish motive. But let us do him justice, and say that these were not the only considerations. Just as the motives of no man are good without some admixture of evil, so are the motives of no man entirely bad. I do not think that Westcott, in taking charge of Katy, was wholly generous, yet there was a generous, and after a fashion, maybe, a loving feeling for the girl in the proposal. That good motives were uppermost, I will not say. They were somewhere in the man, and that is enough to temper our feeling toward him.
Isa Marlay was very unwilling to have Katy go. But the poor little thing was disheartened where she was–the shore did not seem very far away, looking along the water horizontally–the cries of the people on the bank seemed near–she was sure she could not hold on much longer–she was so anxious to get out of this cold lake–she was so afraid to die–she dreaded the black leeches at the bottom–she loved and trusted Smith as such women as she always love and trust–and so she was glad to accept his offer. It was so good of Smith to love her so and to save her. And so she took hold of his coat-collar as he bade her, and Westcott started to swim toward the nearest shore. He had swam his two miles once, when he was a boy, testing his endurance in the waters of the North River, and Diamond Lake was not a mile wide. There seemed no reason to doubt that he could swim to the shore, which could not in any event be more than half a mile away, and which seemed indeed much nearer as he looked over the surface of the water. But Westcott had not taken all the elements into the account. He had on his clothing, and before he had gone far, his boots seemed to fetter him, his saturated sleeves dragged through the water like leaden weights. His limbs, too, had grown numb from remaining so long in the water, and his physical powers had been severely taxed of late years by his dissipations. Add to this that he was encumbered by Katy, that his fright now returned, and that he made the mistake so often made by the best of swimmers under excitement, of wasting power by swimming too high, and you have the causes of rapid exhaustion.
“The shore seems so far away,” murmured Katy. “Why don’t Albert come and save us?” and she held on to Smith with a grasp yet more violent, and he seemed more and more embarrassed by her hold.
“Let go my arm, or we’ll both drown,” he cried savagely, and the poor little thing took her left hand off his arm, but held all the more firmly to his collar; but her heart sank in hopelessness. She had never heard him speak in that savage tone before She only called out feebly, “Brother Albert!” and the cry, which revealed to Westcott that she put no more trust in him, but turned now to the strong heart of her brother, angered him, and helped him to take the resolution he was already meditating. For his strength was fast failing; he looked back and could see the raft nearing the capsized boat, but he felt that he had not strength enough left to return; he began to sink, and Katy, frightened out of all self-control as they went under the water, clutched him desperately with both hands. With one violent effort Smith Westcott tore her little hands from him, and threw her off. He could not save her, anyhow. He must do that, or drown. He was no hero or martyr to drown with her. That is all. It cost him a pang to do it, I doubt not.
Katy came up once, and looked at him. It was not terror at thought of death, so much as it was heart-break at being thus cast off, that looked at him out of her despairing eyes. Then she clasped her hands, and cried aloud, in broken voice: “Brother Albert!”
And then with a broken cry she sank.
Oh! Katy! Katy! It were better to sink. I can hardly shed a tear for thee, as I see thee sink to thy cold bed at the lake-bottom among the slimy water-weeds and leeches; but for women who live to trust professions, and who find themselves cast off and sinking–neglected and helpless in life–for them my heart is breaking.
Oh! little Katy. Sweet, and loving, and trustful! It were better to sink among the water-weeds and leeches than to live on. God is more merciful than man.
CHAPTER XXIV.
DRAGGING.
Yes, God is indeed more merciful than man. There are many things worse than death. There is a fold where no wolves enter; a country where a loving heart shall not find its own love turned into poison; a place where the wicked cease from troubling–yes, even in this heretical day, let us be orthodox enough to believe that there is a land where no Smith Westcotts ever come.
There are many cases in which it were better to die. It is easy enough to say it before it comes. Albert Charlton had said–how many times!–that he would rather see Katy dead than married to Westcott. But, now that Katy was indeed dead, how did he feel?
Charlton and Gray had paddled hard with crooked limbs, the boat was unmanageable, and they could with difficulty keep her in her coarse. As they neared the capsized boat, they saw that the raft had taken the people from it, and Albert heard the voice–there could be no mistake as to the voice, weak and shivering as it was–of Isa Marlay, calling to him from the raft:
“We are all safe. Go and save Katy and–him!”
“There they air!” said Gray, pointing to two heads just visible above the water. “Pull away, by thunder!” And the two half-exhausted young men swung the boat round, and rowed. How they longed for the good oars that had sent the “Pirate’s Bride” driving through the water that afternoon! How they grudged the time spent in righting her when she veered to right or left! At last they heard Katy’s voice cry out, “Brother Albert!”
“O God!” groaned Charlton, and bent himself to his oar again.
“Alb–” The last cry was half-drowned in the water, and when the boat, with half-a-dozen more strokes, reached the place where Westcott was, so that he was able to seize the side, there was no Kate to be seen. Without waiting to lift the exhausted swimmer into the boat, Charlton and Gray dived. But the water was twenty feet deep, the divers were utterly out of breath with rowing, and their diving was of no avail. They kept trying until long after all hope had died out of their hearts. At last Charlton climbed back into the boat, and sat down. Then Gray got in. Westcott was so numb and exhausted from staying in the water so long that he could not get in, but he held to the boat desperately, and begged them to help him.
“Help him in,” said Charlton to Gray. “I can’t.”
“I’d like to help him out ef he wuz in, mighty well. I can’t kill a drownin’ man, but blamed ef I gin him a leetle finger of help. I’d jest as soon help a painter outen the water when I know’d he’d swaller the fust man he come to.”
But Charlton got up and reached a hand to the sinking Westcott. He shut his eyes while he pulled him in, and was almost sorry he had saved him. Let us not be too hard on Albert. He was in the first agony of having reached a hand to save little Katy and missed her. To come so near that you might have succeeded by straining a nerve a little more somewhere–that is bitterest of all. If Westcott had only held on a minute!
It was with difficulty that Albert and Gray rowed to the shore, where Plausaby met them, and persuaded them to change their clothes. They were both soon on the shore again, where large fires were blazing, and the old boat that had failed to save little Katy alive, was now in use to recover her body. There is no more hopeless and melancholy work than dragging for the body of a drowned person. The drag moves over the bottom; the man who holds the rope, watching for the faintest sensation of resistance in the muscles of his arm, at last feels something drawing against the drag, calls to the oarsmen to stop rowing, lets the line slip through his fingers till the boat’s momentum is a little spent, lest he should lose his hold, then he draws on his line gently, and while the boat drifts back, he reverently, as becomes one handling the dead, brings the drag to the surface, and finds that its hooks have brought up nothing but water-weeds, or a waterlogged bough. And when at last, after hours of anxious work, the drag brings the lifeless body to the surface, the disappointment is bitterest of all. For all the time you have seemed to be seeking the drowned person, and now at last you have got–what?
It was about eleven o’clock when they first began to drag. Albert had a sort of vague looking for something, a superstitious feeling that by some sort of a miracle Katy would yet be found alive. It is the hardest work the imagination has to do–this realizing that one who has lived by us will never more be with us. It is hard to project a future for ourselves, into which one who has filled a large share of our thought and affection shall never come. And so there lingers a blind hope, a hopeless hope of something that shall make unreal that which our impotent imaginations refuse to accept as real. It is a means by which nature parries a sudden blow.
Charlton walked up and down the shore, and wished he might take the drag-line into his own hands; but the mistaken kindness of our friends refuses us permission to do for our own dead, when doing anything would be a relief, and when doing for the dead would be the best possible utterance to the hopeless love which we call grief.
Mrs. Plausaby, weak and vain though she was, was full of natural affection. Her love for Albert was checked a little by her feeling that there was no perfect sympathy between him and her. But upon Katy she had lavished all her mother’s love. People are apt to think that a love which is not intelligent is not real; there could be no greater mistake. And the very smallness of the area covered by Mrs. Plausaby’s mind made her grief for Kate all the more passionate. Katy occupied Albert’s mind jointly with Miss Minorkey, with ambition, with benevolence, with science, with literature, and with the great Philanthropinum that was to be built and to revolutionize the world by helping it on toward its “goal.” But the interests that shared Mrs. Plausaby’s thoughts along with Katy were very few. Of Albert she thought, and of her husband. But she gave the chief place to Katy and her own appearance. And so when the blow had come it was a severe one. At midnight, Albert went back to try to comfort his mother, and received patiently all her weeping upbraidings of him for letting his sister go in the boat, he might have known it was not safe. And then he hastened back again to the water, and watched the men in the boat still dragging without result. Everybody on the shore knew just where the “Lady of the Lake” had capsized, and if accurate information, plentifully given, could have helped to find the bodies, it would soon have been accomplished. The only difficulty was that this accurate information was very conflicting, no two of the positive eye-witnesses being able to agree. So there was much shouting along shore, and many directions given, but all the searching for a long time proved vain. All the shouting people hushed their shouting, and spoke in whispers whenever Albert came near. To most men there is nothing more reverend than grief. At half-past two o’clock, the man who held the rope felt a strange thrill, a sense of having touched one of the bodies. He drew up his drag, and one of the hooks held a piece of a black silk cape. When three or four more essays had been made, the body itself was brought to the surface, and the boat turned toward the shore. There was no more shouting of directions now, not a single loud word was spoken, the oarsman rowed with a steady funereal rhythm, while Ben Towle, who had held the drag-rope, now held half out of water the recovered corpse. Albert leaned forward anxiously to see the face of Katy, but it was Jane Downing, the girl who was drowned first. Her father took the body in his arms, drew it out on shore, and wept over it in a quiet fashion for a while. Then strong and friendly neighbors lifted it, and bore it before him to his house, while the man followed in a dumb grief.
Then the dragging for Katy was resumed; but as there was much more doubt in regard to the place where she went down than there was about the place of the accident, the search was more difficult and protracted. George Gray never left Albert for a moment. George wanted to take the drag-rope himself, but a feeling that he was eccentric, if not insane, kept those in charge of the boat from giving it to him.
When Sunday morning came, Katy’s body had not yet been found, and the whole village flocked to the lake shore. These were the first deaths in Metropolisville, and the catastrophe was so sudden and tragic that it stirred the entire village in an extraordinary manner. All through that cloudy Sunday forenoon, in a weary waiting, Charlton sat on the bank of Diamond Lake.
“Mr. Charlton,” said Gray, “git me into that air boat and I’ll git done with this. I’ve watched them fellers go round the place tell I can’t stan’ it no longer.”
The next time the boat faced toward the place where Charlton stood he beckoned to them, and the boat came to the shore.
“Let Mr. Gray row a few times, won’t you?” whispered Albert. “I think he knows the place.”
With that deference always paid to a man in grief, the man who had the oars surrendered them to the Hoosier Poet, who rowed gently and carefully toward the place where he and Albert had dived for Katy the night before. The quick instinct of the trapper stood him in good stead now. The perception and memory of locality and direction are developed to a degree that seems all but supernatural in a man who lives a trapper’s life.
“Now, watch out!” said Gray to the man with the rope, as they passed what he thought to be the place. But the drag did not touch anything. Gray then went round and pulled at right angles across his former course, saying again, “Now, watch out!” as they passed the same spot. The man who held the rope advised him to turn a little to the right, but Gray stuck to his own infallible instinct, and crossed and re-crossed the same point six times without success.
“You see,” he remarked, “you kin come awful closte to a thing in the water and not tech it. We ha’n’t missed six foot nary time we passed thar. It may take right smart rowin’ to do it yet. But when you miss a mark a-tryin’ at it, you don’t gain nothin’ by shootin’ wild. Now, watch out!”
And just at that moment the drag caught but did not hold. Gray noticed it, but neither man said a word. The Inhabitant turned the boat round and pulled slowly back over the same place. The drag caught, and Gray lifted his oars. The man with the rope, who had suddenly got a great reverence for Gray’s skill, willingly allowed him to draw in the line. The Poet did so cautiously and tremblingly. When the body came above the water, he had all he could do to keep from fainting. He gently took hold of the arms and said to his companion, “Pull away now.” And with his own wild, longing, desolate heart full of grief, Gray held to the little form and drew her through the water. Despite his grief, the Poet was glad to be the one who should bring her ashore. He held her now, if only her dead body, and his unselfish love found a melancholy recompense. Albert would have chosen him of all men for the office.
Poor little Kate! In that dread moment when she found herself sinking to her cold bed among the water-weeds, she had, failing all other support, clasped her left hand with her right and gone down to darkness. And as she went, so now came her lifeless body. The right hand clasped tightly the four little white fingers of the left.
Poor little Kate! How white as pearl her face was, turned up toward that Sabbath sky! There was not a spot upon it. The dreaded leeches had done their work.
She, whom everybody had called sweet, looked sweeter now than ever. Death had been kind to the child at the last, and had stroked away every trace of terror, and of the short anguish she had suffered when she felt herself cast off by the craven soul she trusted. What might the long anguish have been had she lived!
[Illustration: HIS UNSELFISH LOVE FOUND A MELANCHOLY RECOMPENSE.]
CHAPTER XXV.
AFTERWARDS.
The funeral was over, and there were two fresh graves–the only ones in the bit of prairie set apart for a graveyard. I have written enough in this melancholy strain. Why should I pause to describe in detail the solemn services held in the grove by the lake? It is enough that the land-shark forgot his illegal traffic in claims; the money-lender ceased for one day to talk of mortgages and per cent and foreclosure; the fat gentleman left his corner-lots. Plausaby’s bland face was wet with tears of sincere grief, and Mr. Minorkey pressed his hand to his chest and coughed more despairingly than ever. The grove in which the meeting was held commanded a view of the lake at the very place where the accident occurred. The nine survivors sat upon the front seat of all; the friends of the deceased were all there, and, most pathetic sight of all, the two mute white faces of the drowned were exposed to view. The people wept before the tremulous voice of the minister had begun the service, and there was so much weeping that the preacher could say but little. Poor Mrs. Plausaby was nearly heart-broken. Nothing could have been more pathetic than her absurd mingling for two days of the sincerest grief and an anxious questioning about her mourning-dress. She would ask Isa’s opinion concerning her veil, and then sit down and cry piteously the next minute. And now she was hopeless and utterly disconsolate at the loss of her little Katy, but wondering all the time whether Isa could not have fixed her bonnet so that it would not have looked quite so plain.
The old minister preached on “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.” I am afraid he said some things which the liberalism of to-day would think unfit–we all have heresies nowadays; it is quite the style. But at least the old man reminded them that there were better investments than corner-lots, and that even mortgages with waivers in them will be brought into judgment. His solemn words could not have failed entirely of doing good.
But the solemn funeral services were over; the speculator in claims dried his eyes, and that very afternoon assigned a claim, to which he had no right, to a simple-minded immigrant for a hundred dollars. Minorkey was devoutly thankful that his own daughter had escaped, and that he could go on getting mortgages with waivers in them, and Plausaby turned his attention to contrivances for extricating himself from the embarrassments of his situation.
The funeral was over. That is the hardest time of all. You can bear up somehow, so long as the arrangements and cares and melancholy tributes of the obsequies last. But if one has occupied a large share of your thoughts, solicitudes, and affections, and there comes a time when the very last you can ever do for them, living or dead, is done, then for the first time you begin to take the full measure of your loss. Albert felt now that he was picking up the broken threads of another man’s life. Between the past, which had been full of anxieties and plans for little Kate, and the future, into which no little Kate could ever come, there was a great chasm. There is nothing that love parts from so regretfully as its burdens.
Mrs. Ferret came to see Charlton, and smiled her old sudden puckered smile, and talked in her jerky complacent voice about the uses of sanctified affliction, and her trust that the sudden death of his sister in all the thoughtless vanity of youth would prove a solemn and impressive warning to him to repent in health before it should be with him everlastingly too late. Albert was very far from having that childlike spirit which enters the kingdom of heaven easily. Some natures, are softened by affliction, but they are not such as his. Charlton in his aggressiveness demanded to know the reason for everything. And in his sorrow his nature sent a defiant _why_ back to the Power that had made Katy’s fate so sad, and Mrs. Ferret’s rasping way of talking about Katy’s death as a divine judgment on him filled him with curses bitterer than Job’s.
Miss Isa Marlay was an old-school Calvinist. She had been trained on the Assembly’s Catechism, interpreted in good sound West Windsor fashion. In theory she never deviated one iota from the solid ground of the creed of her childhood. But while she held inflexibly to her creed in all its generalizations, she made all those sweet illogical exceptions which women of her kind are given to making. In general, she firmly believed that everybody who failed to have a saving faith in the vicarious atonement of Christ would be lost. In particular, she excepted many individual cases among her own acquaintance. And the inconsistency between her creed and her applications of it never troubled her. She spoke with so much confidence of the salvation of little Kate, that she comforted Albert somewhat, notwithstanding his entire antagonism to Isa’s system of theology. If Albert had died, Miss Marlay would have fixed up a short and easy road to bliss for him also. So much, more generous is faith than logic! But it was not so much Isa’s belief in the salvation of Katy that did Albert good, as it was her tender and delicate sympathy, expressed as much when she was silent as when she spoke, and when she spoke expressed more by the tones of her voice than by her words.
There was indeed one part of Isabel’s theology that Charlton would have much liked to possess. He had accepted the idea of an Absolute God. A personal, sympathizing, benevolent Providence was in his opinion one of the illusions of the theologic stage of human development. Things happened by inexorable law, he said. And in the drowning of Katy he saw only the overloading of a boat and the inevitable action of water upon the vital organs of the human system. It seemed to him now an awful thing that such great and terrible forces should act irresistibly and blindly. He wished he could find some ground upon which to base a different opinion. He would like to have had Isabel’s faith in the Paternity of God and in the immortality of the soul. But he was too honest with himself to suffer feeling to exert any influence on his opinions. He was in the logical stage of his development, and built up his system after the manner of the One-Hoss Shay. Logically he could not see sufficient ground to change, and he scorned the weakness that would change an opinion because of feeling. His soul might cry out in its depths for a Father in the universe. But what does Logic care for a Soul or its cry? After a while a wider experience brings in something better than Logic. This is Philosophy. And Philosophy knows what Logic can not learn, that reason is not the only faculty by which truth is apprehended–that the hungers and intuitions of the Soul are worth more than syllogisms.
Do what he would, Charlton could not conceal from himself that in sympathy Miss Minorkey was greatly deficient. She essayed to show feeling, but she had little to show. It was not her fault. Do you blame the dahlia for not having the fragrance of a tuberose? It is the most dangerous quality of enthusiastic young men and women that they are able to deceive themselves. Nine tenths of all conjugal disappointments come from the ability of people in love to see more in those they love than ever existed there. That love is blind is a fable. He has an affection of the eyes, but it is not blindness. Nobody else ever sees so much as he does. For here was Albert Charlton, bound by his vows to Helen Minorkey, with whom he had nothing in common, except in intellect, and already his sorrow was disclosing to him the shallowness of her nature, and the depth of his own; even now he found that she had no voice with which to answer his hungry cry for sympathy. Already his betrothal was becoming a fetter, and his great mistake was disclosing itself to him. The rude suspicion had knocked at his door before, but he had been able to bar it out. Now it stared at him in the night, and he could not rid himself of it. But he was still far enough from accepting the fact that the intellectual Helen Minorkey was destitute of all unselfish feeling. For Charlton was still in love with her. When one has fixed heart and hope and thought on a single person, love does not die with the first consciousness of disappointment. Love can subsist a long time on old associations. Besides, Miss Minorkey was not aggressively or obtrusively selfish–she never interfered with anybody else. But there is a cool-blooded indifference that can be moved by no consideration outside the Universal Ego. That was Helen.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE MYSTERY.
I have before me, as one of the original sources of information for this history, a file of _The Wheat County Weakly Windmill_ for 1856. It is not a large sheet, but certainly it is a very curious one. In its day this _Windmill_ ground many grists, though its editorial columns were chiefly occupied with impartial gushing and expansive articles on the charms of scenery, fertility of soil, superiority of railroad prospects, admirableness of location, healthfulness, and general future rosiness of the various paper towns that paid tribute to its advertising columns. And the advertising columns! They abounded in business announcements of men who had “Money to Loan on Good Real Estate” at three, four, five, and six per cent a month, and of persons who called themselves “Attorneys-at-Law and Real Estate Agents,” who stated that “All business relating to pre-emption and contested claims would be promptly attended to” at their offices in Perritaut. Even now, through the thin disguise of honest-seeming phrases, one can see the bait of the land-shark who speculated in imaginary titles to claims, or sold corner-lots in bubble-towns. And, as for the towns, it appears from these advertisements that there was one on almost every square mile, and that every one of them was on the line of an inevitable railroad, had a first-class hotel, a water-power, an academy, and an indefinite number of etcaeteras of the most delightful and remunerative kind. Each one of these villages was in the heart of the greatest grain-growing section of the State. Each, was the “natural outlet” to a large agricultural region. Each commanded the finest view. Each point was the healthiest in the county, and each village was “unrivaled.” (When one looks at these town-site advertisements, one is tempted to think that member serious and wise who, about this time, offered a joint resolution in the Territorial Legislature, which read: “_Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives_, That not more than two thirds of the area of this Territory should be laid out in town-sites and territorial roads, the remaining one third to be sacredly reserved for agricultural use.”)
But I prize this old file of papers because it contains a graphic account of the next event in this narrative. And the young man who edited the _Windmill_ at this time has told the story with so much sprightliness and vigor that I can not serve my reader a better turn than by clipping his account and pasting it just here in my manuscript. (I shall also rest myself a little, and do a favor to the patient printer, who will rejoice to get a little “reprint copy” in place of my perplexing manuscript.) For where else shall I find such a dictionariful command of the hights and depths–to say nothing of the lengths and breadths–of the good old English tongue? This young man must indeed have been a marvel of eloquent verbosity at that period of his career. The article in question has the very flavor of the golden age of Indian contracts, corner-lots, six per cent a month, and mortgages with waiver clauses. There, is also visible, I fear, a little of the prejudice which existed at that time in Perritaut against Metropolisville.
[Illustration: THE EDITOR OF “THE WINDMILL.”]
I wish that an obstinate scruple on the part of the printers and the limits of a duodecimo page did not forbid my reproducing here, in all their glory, the unique head-lines which precede the article in question. Any pageant introduced by music is impressive, says Madame de Stael. At least she says something of that sort, only it is in French, and I can not remember it exactly. And so any newspaper article is startling when introduced by the braying of head-lines. Fonts of type for displayed lines were not abundant in the office of the _Windmill_, but they were very stunning, and were used also for giving prominence to the euphonious names of the several towns, whose charms were set forth in the advertisements. Of course the first of these head-lines ran “Startling Disclosures!!!!” and then followed “Tremendous Excitement in Metropolisville!” “Official Rascality!” “Bold Mail Robbery!” “Arrest of the Postmaster!” “No Doubt of his Guilt!” “An Unexplained Mystery!” “Sequel to the Awful Drowning Affair of Last Week!” Having thus whetted the appetite of his reader, and economized in type-setting by nearly a column of such broad and soul-stirring typography, the editor proceeds:
“Metropolisville is again the red-hot crater of a boiling and seething excitement. Scarcely had the rascally and unscrupulous county-seat swindle begun to lose something of its terrific and exciting interest to the people of this county, when there came the awful and sad drowning of the two young ladies, Miss Jennie Downing and Miss Katy Charlton, the belles of the village, a full account of which will be found in the _Windmill_ of last week, some copies of which we have still on hand, having issued an extra edition. Scarcely had the people of Metropolisville laid these two charming and much-lamented young ladies in their last, long resting-place, the quiet grave, when there comes like an earthquake out of a clear sky, the frightful and somewhat surprising and stunning intelligence that the postmaster of the village, a young man of a hitherto unexceptionable and blameless reputation, has been arrested for robbing the mails. It is supposed that his depredations have been very extensive and long continued, and that many citizens of our own village may have suffered from them. Farther investigations will doubtless bring all his nefarious and unscrupulous transactions to light. At present, however, he is under arrest on the single charge of stealing a land-warrant.
“The name of the rascally, villainous, and dishonest postmaster is Albert Charlton, and here comes in the wonderful and startling romance of this strange story. The carnival of excitement in Metropolisville and about Metropolisville has all had to do with one family. Our readers will remember how fully we have exposed the unscrupulous tricks of the old fox Plausaby, the contemptible land-shark who runs Metropolisville, and who now has temporary possession of the county-seat by means of a series of gigantic frauds, and of wholesale bribery and corruption and nefarious ballot-box stuffing. The fair Katy Charlton, who was drowned by the heart-rending calamity of last week, was his step-daughter, and now her brother, Albert Charlton, is arrested as a vile and dishonest mail-robber, and the victim whose land-warrant he stole was Miss Kate Charlton’s betrothed lover, Mr. Smith Westcott. There was always hatred and animosity, however, between the lover and the brother, and it is hinted that the developments on the trial will prove that young Charlton had put a hired and ruthless assassin on the track of Westcott at the time of his sister’s death. Mr. Westcott is well known and highly esteemed in Metropolisville and also here in Perritaut. He is the gentlemanly Agent in charge of the branch store of Jackson, Jones & Co., and we rejoice that he has made so narrow an escape from death at the hands of his relentless and unscrupulous foe.
“As for Albert Charlton, it is well for the community that he has been thus early and suddenly overtaken in the first incipiency of a black career of crime. His poor mother is said to be almost insane at this second grief, which follows so suddenly on her heart-rending bereavement of last week. We wish there were some hope that this young man, thus arrested with the suddenness of a thunderbolt by the majestic and firm hand of public justice, would reform; but we are told that he is utterly hard, and refuses to confess or deny his guilt, sitting in moody and gloomy silence in the room in which he is confined. We again call the attention of the proper authorities to the fact that Plausaby has not kept his agreement, and that Wheat County has no secure jail. We trust that the youthful villain Charlton will not be allowed to escape, but that he will receive the long term provided by the law for thieving postmasters. He will be removed to St. Paul immediately, but we seize the opportunity to demand in thunder-tones how long the citizens of this county are to be left without the accommodations of a secure jail, of which they stand in such immediate need? It is a matter in which we all feel a personal interest. We hope the courts will decide the county-seat question at once, and then we trust the commissioners will give us a jail of sufficient size and strength to accommodate a county of ten thousand people.
“We would not judge young Charlton before he has a fair trial. We hope he will have a fair trial, and it is not for us to express any opinions on the case in advance. If he shall be found guilty–and we do not for a moment doubt he will–we trust the court will give him the full penalty of the law without fear or favor, so that his case may prove a solemn and impressive warning that shall make a lasting impression on the minds of the thoughtless young men of this community in favor of honesty, and in regard to the sinfulness of stealing. We would not exult over the downfall of any man; but when the proud young Charlton gets his hair cropped, and finds himself clad in ‘Stillwater gray,’ and engaged in the intellectual employments of piling shingles and making vinegar-barrels, he will have plenty of time for meditation on that great moral truth, that honesty is generally the best policy.”
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE ARREST.
The eloquent editor from whom I have just quoted told the truth when he said that Metropolisville was “the red-hot crater of a boiling and seething excitement.” For everybody had believed in Charlton. He was not popular. People with vicarious consciences are not generally beloved unless they are tempered by much suavity. And Charlton was not. But everybody, except Mrs. Ferret, believed in his honesty and courage. Nobody had doubted his sincerity, though Smith Westcott had uttered many innuendoes. In truth, Westcott had had an uncomfortable time during the week that followed the drowning. There had been much shaking of the head about little Katy’s death. People who are not at all heroic like to have other people do sublime things, and there were few who did not think that Westcott should have drowned with Katy, like the hero of a romance. People could not forgive him for spoiling a good story. So Smith got the cold shoulder, and might have left the Territory, but that his land-warrant had not come. He ceased to dance and to appear cheerful, and his he! he! took on a sneering inflection. He grew mysterious, and intimated to his friends that he’d give Metropolisville something else to talk about before long. By George! He! he! And when the deputy of the United States marshal swooped down upon the village and arrested the young post-master on a charge of abstracting Smith Westcott’s land-warrant from the mail, the whole town was agog. “Told you so. By George!” said Westcott.
At first the villagers were divided in opinion about Albert. Plenty of people, like Mrs. Ferret, were ready to rejoice that he was not so good as he might be, you know. But many others said that he wouldn’t steal. A fellow that had thrown away all his chances of making money wouldn’t steal. To which it was rejoined that if Charlton did not care for money he was a good hater, and that what such a man would not do for money he might do for spite. And then, too, it was known that Albert had been very anxious to get away, and that he wanted to get away before Westcott did. And that everything depended on which should get a land-warrant first. What more natural than that Charlton should seize upon Smith Westcott’s land-warrant, and thus help himself and retard his rival? This sort of reasoning staggered those who would have defended him on the ground of previous good character.
But that which shook the popular confidence in Albert most was his own behavior when arrested. He was perfectly collected until he inquired what evidence there was against him. The deputy marshal said that it was very clear evidence, indeed. “The land-warrant with which you pre-empted your claim bore a certain designating number. The prosecution can prove that that warrant was mailed at Red Owl on the 24th of August, directed to Smith Westcott, Metropolisville, and that he failed to receive it. The stolen property appearing in your hands, you must account for it in some way.”
At this Charlton’s countenance fell, and he refused to make any explanations or answer any questions. He was purposely kept over one day in Metropolisville in hope that something passing between him and his friends, who were permitted to have free access to him, might bring further evidence to light. But Charlton sat, pale and dejected, ready enough to converse about anything else, but declining to say one word in regard to his guilt or innocence of the crime charged. It is not strange that some of his best friends accepted the charge as true, and only tried to extenuate the offense on the ground that the circumstances made the temptation a very great one, and that the motive was not mercenary. Others stood out that it would yet be discovered that Plausaby had stolen the warrant, until half-a-dozen people remembered that Plausaby himself had been in Red Owl at that very time–he had spent a week there laying out a marshy shore in town lots down to the low-water mark, and also laying out the summit of a bluff three hundred and fifty feet high and sixty degrees steep. These sky and water lots were afterward sold to confiding Eastern speculators, and a year or two later the owner of the water privileges rowed all over his lots in a skiff. Whether the other purchaser used a balloon to reach his is not known. But the operation of staking out these ineligible “additions” to the city of Red Owl had attracted much attention, and consequently Plausaby’s _alibi_ was readily established. So that the two or three who still believed Albert innocent did so by “naked faith,” and when questioned about it, shook their heads, and said that it was a great mystery. They could not understand it, but they did not believe him guilty. Isabel Marlay believed in Albert’s innocence as she believed the hard passages in the catechism. She knew it, she believed it, she could not prove it, but she would not hear to anything else. She was sure of his innocence, and that was enough. For when a woman of that sort believes anything, she believes in spite of all her senses and all reason. What are the laws of evidence to her! She believes with the _heart_.
Poor Mrs. Plausaby, too, sat down in a dumb despair, and wept and complained and declared that she knew her Albert had notions and such things, but people with such notions wouldn’t do anything naughty. Albert wouldn’t, she knew. He hadn’t done any harm, and they couldn’t find out that he had. Katy was gone, and now Albert was in trouble, and she didn’t know what to do. She thought Isa might do something, and not let all these troubles come on her in this way. For the poor woman had come to depend on Isa not only in weighty matters, such as dresses and bonnets, but also in all the other affairs of life. And it seemed to her a grievous wrong that Isabel, who had saved her from so many troubles, should not have kept Katy from drowning and Albert from prison.
The chief trouble in the mind of Albert was not the probability of imprisonment, nor the overthrow of his educational schemes–though all of these were cups of bitterness. But the first thought with him was to ask what would be the effect of his arrest on Miss Minorkey. He had felt some disappointment in not finding Helen the ideal woman he had pictured her, but, as I said a while ago, love does not die at the first disappointment. If it finds little to live on in the one who is loved, it will yet find enough in the memories, the hopes, and the ideals that dwell within the lover. Charlton, in the long night after his arrest, reviewed everything, but in thinking of Miss Minorkey, he did not once recur to her lack of deep sympathy with him in his sorrow for Katy. The Helen he thought of was the radiant Helen that sat by his beloved Katy in the boat on that glorious evening in which he rowed in the long northern twilight, the Helen that had relaxed her dignity enough to dip her palm in the water and dash spray into his face. He saw her like one looking back through clouds of blackness to catch a sight of a bit of sky and a single shining star. As the impossibility of his marrying Helen became more and more evident to him, she grew all the more glorious in her culture, her quietness, her thoughtfulness. That she would break her heart for him, he did not imagine, but he did hope–yes, hope–that she would suffer acutely on his account.
And when Isa Marlay bravely walked through the crowd that had gathered about the place of his confinement, and asked to see him, and he was told that a young lady wanted to be admitted, he hoped that it might be Helen Minorkey. When he saw that it was Isabel he was glad, partly because he would rather have seen her than anybody else, next to Helen, and partly because he could ask her to carry a message to Miss Minorkey. He asked her to take from his trunk, which had already been searched by the marshal’s deputy, all the letters of Miss Minorkey, to tie them in a package, and to have the goodness to present them to that lady with his sincere regards.
“Shall I tell her that you are innocent?” asked Isabel, wishing to strengthen her own faith by a word of assurance from Albert.
“Tell her–” and Albert cast down his eyes a moment in painful reflection–“tell her that I will explain some day. Meantime, tell her to believe what you believe about me.”
“I believe that you are innocent.”
“Thank you, Miss Isabel,” said Albert warmly, but then he stopped and grew red in the face. He did not give her one word of assurance. Even Isa’s faith was staggered for a moment. But only for a moment. The faith of a woman like Isabel Marlay laughs at doubt.
I do not know how to describe the feelings with which Miss Marlay went out from Albert. Even in the message, full of love, which he had sent to his mother, he did not say one word about his guilt or innocence. And yet Isabel believed in her heart that he had not committed the crime. While he was strong and free from suspicion, Isa Marlay had admired him. He seemed to her, notwithstanding his eccentricities, a man of such truth, fervor, and earnestness of character, that she liked him better than she was willing to admit to herself. Now that he was an object of universal suspicion, her courageous and generous heart espoused his cause vehemently. She stood ready to do anything in the world for him. Anything but what he had asked her to do. Why she did not like to carry messages from him to Miss Minorkey she did not know. As soon as she became conscious of this jealous feeling in her heart, she took herself to task severely. Like the good girl she was, she set her sins out in the light of her own conscience. She did more than that. But if I should tell you truly what she did with this naughty feeling, how she dragged it out into the light and presence of the Holy One Himself, I should seem to be writing cant, and people would say that I was preaching. And yet I should only show you the source of Isa’s high moral and religious culture. Can I write truly of a life in which the idea of God as Father, Monitor, and Friend is ever present and dominant, without showing you the springs of that life?
When Isabel Marlay, with subdued heart, sought Miss Minorkey, it was with her resolution fixed to keep the trust committed to her, and, as far as possible, to remove all suspicions from Miss Minorkey’s mind. As for any feeling in her own heart–she had no right to have any feeling but a friendly one to Albert. She would despise a woman who could love a man that did not first declare his love for her. She said this to herself several times by way of learning the lesson well.
Isa found Miss Minorkey, with her baggage packed, ready for a move. Helen told Miss Marlay that her father found the air very bad for him, and meant to go to St. Anthony, where there was a mineral spring and a good hotel. For her part, she was glad of it, for a little place like Metropolisville was not pleasant. So full of gossip. And no newspapers or books. And very little cultivated society.
Miss Marlay said she had a package of something or other, which Mr. Charlton had sent with his regards. She said “something or other” from an instinctive delicacy.
“Oh! yes; something of mine that he borrowed, I suppose,” said Helen. “Have you seen him? I’m really sorry for him. I found him a very pleasant companion, so full of reading and oddities. He’s the last man I should have believed could rob the post-office.”
“Oh! but he didn’t,” said Isa.
“Indeed! Well, I’m glad to hear it. I hope he’ll be able to prove it. Is there any new evidence?”
Isa was obliged to confess that she had heard of none, and Miss Minorkey proceeded like a judge to explain to Miss Marlay how strong the evidence against him was. And then she said she thought the warrant had been taken, not from cupidity, but from a desire to serve Katy. It was a pity the law could not see it in that way. But all the time Isa protested with vehemence that she did not believe a word of it. Not one word. All the judges and juries and witnesses in the world could not convince her of Albert’s guilt. Because she knew him, and she just knew that he couldn’t do it, you see.
Miss Minorkey said it had made her father sick. “I’ve gone with Mr. Charlton so much, you know, that it has made talk,” she said. “And father feels bad about it. And”–seeing the expression of Isa’s countenance, she concluded that it would not do to be quite so secretive–“and, to tell you the truth, I did like him. But of course that is all over. Of course there couldn’t be anything between us after this, even if he were innocent.”
Isa grew indignant, and she no longer needed the support of religious faith and high moral principle to enable her to plead the cause of Albert Charlton with Miss Minorkey.
“But I thought you loved him,” she said, with just a spice of bitterness. “The poor fellow believes that you love him.”
Miss Minorkey winced a little. “Well, you know, some people are sentimental, and others are not. It is a good thing for me that I’m not one of those that pine away and die after anybody. I suppose I am not worthy of a high-toned man, such as he seemed to be. I have often told him so. I am sure I never could marry a man that had been in the penitentiary, if he were ever so innocent. Now, could you. Miss Marlay?”
Isabel blushed, and said she could if he were innocent. She thought a woman ought to stand by the man she loved to the death, if he were worthy. But Helen only sighed humbly, and said that she never was made for a heroine. She didn’t even like to read about high-strung people in novels. She supposed it was her fault–people had to be what they were, she supposed. Miss Marlay must excuse her, though. She hadn’t quite got her books packed, and the stage would be along in an hour. She would be glad if Isabel would tell Mr. Charlton privately, if she had a chance, how sorry she felt for him. But please not say anything that would compromise her, though.
And Isa Marlay went out of the hotel full of indignation at the cool-blooded Helen, and full of a fathomless pity for Albert, a pity that made her almost love him herself. She would have loved to atone for all Miss Minorkey’s perfidy. And just alongside of her pity for Charlton thus deserted, crept in a secret joy. For there was now none to stand nearer friend to Albert than herself.
And yet Charlton did not want for friends. Whisky Jim had a lively sense of gratitude to him for his advocacy of Jim’s right to the claim as against Westcott; and having also a lively antagonism to Westcott, he could see no good reason why a man should serve a long term in State’s-prison for taking from a thief a land-warrant with which the thief meant to pre-empt another man’s claim. And the Guardian Angel had transferred to the brother the devotion and care he once lavished on the sister. It was this unity of sentiment between the Jehu from the Green Mountains and the minstrel from the Indiana “Pocket” that gave Albert a chance for liberty.
The prisoner was handcuffed and confined in an upper room, the windows of which were securely boarded up on the outside. About three o’clock of the last night he spent in Metropolisville, the deputy marshal, who in the evening preceding had helped to empty two or three times the ample flask of Mr. Westcott, was sleeping very soundly. Albert, who was awake, heard the nails drawn from the boards. Presently the window was opened, and a familiar voice said in a dramatic tone:
“Mr. Charlton, git up and foller.”
Albert arose and went to the window.
“Come right along, I ‘low the coast’s clear,” said the Poet.
“No, I can not do that, Gray,” said Charlton, though the prospect of liberty was very enticing.
“See here, mister, I calkilate es this is yer last chance fer fifteen year ur more,” put in the driver, thrusting his head in alongside his Hoosier friend’s.
“Come,” added Gray, “you an’ me’ll jest put out together fer the Ingin kedentry ef you say so, and fetch up in Kansas under some fancy names, and take a hand in the wras’le that’s agoin’ on thar. Nobody’ll ever track you. I’ve got a Yankton friend as’ll help us through.”
“My friends, I’m ever so thankful to you–“
“Blame take yer thanks! Come along,” broke in the Superior Being. “It’s now ur never.”
“I’ll be dogged ef it haint,” said the Poet.
Charlton looked out wistfully over the wide prairies. He might escape and lead a wild, free life with Gray, and then turn up in some new Territory under an assumed name and work out his destiny. But the thought of being a fugitive from justice was very shocking to him.
[Illustration: “GIT UP AND FOLLER!”]
“No! no! I can’t. God bless you both. Good-by!” And he went back to his pallet on the floor. When the rescuers reached the ground the Superior Being delivered himself of some very sulphurous oaths, intended to express his abhorrence of “idees.”
“There’s that air blamed etarnal infarnal nateral born eejiot’ll die in Stillwater penitensh’ry jest fer idees. Orter go to a ‘sylum.”
But the Poet went off dejectedly to his lone cabin on the prairie.
And there was a great row in the morning about the breaking open of the window and the attempted rescue. The deputy marshal told a famous story of his awaking in the night and driving off a rescuing party of eight with his revolver. And everybody wondered who they were. Was Charlton, then, a member of a gang?
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE TEMPTER.
Albert was conveyed to St. Paul, but not until he had had one heart-breaking interview with his mother. The poor woman had spent nearly an hour dressing herself to go to him, for she was so shaken with agitation and blinded with weeping, that she could hardly tie a ribbon or see that her breast-pin was in the right place. This interview with her son shook her weak understanding to its foundations, and for days afterward Isa devoted her whole time to diverting her from the accumulation of troubled thoughts and memories that filled her with anguish–an anguish against the weight of which her feeble nature could offer no supports.
When Albert was brought before the commissioner, he waived examination, and was committed to await the session of the district court. Mr. Plausaby came up and offered to become his bail, but this Charlton vehemently refused, and was locked up in jail, where for the next two or three months he amused himself by reading the daily papers and such books as he could borrow, and writing on various subjects manuscripts which he never published.
The confinement chafed him. His mother’s sorrow and feeble health oppressed him. And despite all he could do, his own humiliation bowed his head a little. But most of all, the utter neglect of Helen Minorkey hurt him sorely. Except that she had sent, through Isabel Marlay, that little smuggled message that she was sorry for him–like one who makes a great ado about sending you something which turns out to be nothing–except this mockery of pity, he had no word or sign from Helen. His mind dwelt on her as he remembered her in the moments when she had been carried out of herself by the contagion of his own enthusiasm, when she had seemed to love him devotedly. Especially did he think of her as she sat in quiet and thoughtful enjoyment in the row-boat by the side of Katy, playfully splashing the water and seeming to rejoice in his society. And now she had so easily accepted his guilt!
These thoughts robbed him of sleep, and the confinement and lack of exercise made him nervous. The energetic spirit, arrested at the very instant of beginning cherished enterprises, and shut out from hope of ever undertaking them, preyed upon itself, and Albert had a morbid longing for the State’s prison, where he might weary himself with toil.
His counsel was Mr. Conger. Mr. Conger was not a great jurist. Of the philosophy of law he knew nothing. For the sublime principles of equity and the great historic developments that underlie the conventions which enter into the administration of public justice, Mr. Conger cared nothing. But there was one thing Mr. Conger did understand and care for, and that was success. He was a man of medium hight, burly, active, ever in motion. When he had ever been still long enough to read law, nobody knew. He said everything he had to say with a quick, vehement utterance, as though he grudged the time taken to speak fully about anything. He went along the street eagerly; he wrote with all his might. There were twenty men in the Territory, at that day, any one of whom knew five times as much law as he. Other members of the bar were accustomed to speak contemptuously of Conger’s legal knowledge. But Conger won more cases and made more money than any of them. If he did not know law in the widest sense, he did know it in the narrowest. He always knew the law that served his turn. When he drew an assignment for a client, no man could break it. And when he undertook a case, he was sure to find his opponent’s weak point. He would pick flaws in pleas; he would postpone; he would browbeat witnesses; he would take exceptions to the rulings of the court in order to excite the sympathy of the jury; he would object to testimony on the other side, and try to get in irrelevant testimony on his own; he would abuse the opposing counsel, crying out, “The counsel on the other side lies like thunder, and he knows it!” By shrewdness, by an unwearying perseverance, by throwing his whole weight into his work, Conger made himself the most successful lawyer of his time in the Territory. And preserved his social position at the same time, for though he was not at all scrupulous, he managed to keep on the respectable side of the line which divides the lawyer from the shyster.
Mr. Conger had been Mr. Plausaby’s counsel in one or two cases, and Charlton, knowing no other lawyer, sent for him. Mr. Conger had, with his characteristic quickness of perception, picked up the leading features of the case from the newspapers. He sat down on the bed in Charlton’s cell with his brisk professional air, and came at once to business in his jerky-polite tone.
“Bad business, this, Mr. Charlton, but let us hope we’ll pull through. _We_ generally _do_ pull through. Been in a good many tight places in my time. But it is necessary, first of all, that you trust me. The boat is in a bad way–you hail a pilot–he comes aboard. Now–hands off the helm–you sit down and let the pilot steer her through. You understand?” And Mr. Conger looked as though he might have smiled at his own illustration if he could have spared the time. But he couldn’t. As for Albert, he only looked more dejected.
“Now,” he proceeded, “let’s get to business. In the first place, you must trust me with everything. You must tell me whether you took the warrant or not.” And Mr. Conger paused and scrutinized his client closely.
Charlton said nothing, but his face gave evidence of a struggle.
“Well, well, Mr. Charlton,” said the brisk man with the air of one who has gotten through the first and most disagreeable part of his business, and who now proposes to proceed immediately to the next matter on the docket. “Well, well, Mr. Charlton, you needn’t say anything if the question is an unpleasant one. An experienced lawyer knows what silence means, of course,” and there was just a trifle of self-gratulation in his voice. As for Albert, he winced, and seemed to be trying to make up his mind to speak.
“Now,” and with this _now_ the lawyer brought his white fat hand down upon his knee in an emphatic way, as one who says “nextly.” “Now–there are several courses open to us. I asked you whether you took the warrant or not, because the line of defense that presents itself first is to follow the track of your suspicions, and fix the guilt on some one else if we can. I understand, however, that that course is closed to us?”
Charlton nodded his head.
“We might try to throw suspicion–only suspicion, you know–on the stage-driver or somebody else. Eh? Just enough to confuse the jury?”
Albert shook his head a little impatiently.
“Well, well, that’s so–_not_ the _best_ line. The warrant was in your hands. You used it for pre-emption. That is very ugly, very. I don’t think much of that line, under the circumstances. It might excite feeling against us. It is a very bad case. But we will pull through, I hope. We generally do. Give the case wholly into my hands. We’ll postpone, I think. I shall have to make an affidavit that there are important witnesses absent, or something of the sort. But we’ll have the case postponed. There’s some popular feeling against you, and juries go as the newspapers do. Now, I see but one way, and that is to postpone until the feeling dies down. Then we can manage the papers a little and get up some sympathy for you. And there’s no knowing what may happen. There’s nothing like delay in a bad case. Wait long enough, and something is sure to turn up.”
“But I don’t want the case postponed,” said Charlton decidedly.
“Very natural that you shouldn’t like to wait. This is not a pleasant room. But it is better to wait a year or even two years in this jail than to go to prison for fifteen or twenty. Fifteen or twenty years out of the life of a young man is about all there is worth the having.”
Here Charlton shuddered, and Mr. Conger was pleased to see that his words took effect.
“You’d better make up your mind that the case is a bad one, and trust to my experience. When you’re sick, trust the doctor. I think I can pull you through if you’ll leave the matter to me.”
“Mr. Conger,” said Charlton, lifting up his pale face, twitching with nervousness, “I don’t want to get free by playing tricks on a court of law. I know that fifteen or twenty years in prison would not leave me much worth living for, but I will not degrade myself by evading justice with delays and false affidavits. If you can do anything for me fairly and squarely, I should like to have it done.”
“Scruples, eh?” asked Mr. Conger in surprise.
“Yes, scruples,” said Albert Charlton, leaning his head on his hands with the air of one who has made a great exertion and has a feeling of exhaustion.
“Scruples, Mr. Charlton, are well enough when one is about to break the law. After one has been arrested, scruples are in the way.”
“You have no right to presume that I have broken the law,” said Charlton with something of his old fire.
“Well, Mr. Charlton, it will do no good for you to quarrel with your counsel. You have as good as confessed the crime yourself. I must insist that you leave the case in my hands, or I must throw it up. Take time to think about it. I’ll send my partner over to get any suggestions from you about witnesses. The most we can do is to prove previous good character. That isn’t worth anything where the evidence against the prisoner is so conclusive–as in your case. But it makes a show of doing something.” And Mr. Conger was about leaving the cell when, as if a new thought had occurred to him, he turned back and sat down again and said: “There _is_ one other course open to you. Perhaps it is the best, since you will not follow my plan. You can plead guilty, and trust to the clemency of the President. I think strong political influences could be brought to bear at Washington in favor of your pardon?”
Charlton shook his head, and the lawyer left him “to think the matter over,” as he said. Then ensued the season of temptation. Why should he stand on a scruple? Why not get free? Here was a conscienceless attorney, ready to make any number of affidavits in regard to the absence of important witnesses; ready to fight the law by every technicality of the law. His imprisonment had already taught him how dear liberty was, and, within half an hour after Conger left him, a great change came over him. Why should he go to prison? What justice was there in his going to prison? Here he was, taking a long sentence to the penitentiary, while such men as Westcott and Conger were out. There could be no equity in such an arrangement. Whenever a man begins to seek equality of dispensation, he is in a fair way to debauch his conscience. And another line of thought influenced Charlton. The world needed his services. What advantage would there be in throwing away the chances of a lifetime on a punctilio? Why might he not let the serviceable lawyer do as he pleased? Conger was the keeper of his own conscience, and would not be either more or less honest at heart for what he did or did not do. All the kingdoms of the earth could not have tempted Charlton to serve himself by another man’s perjury. But liberty on one hand and State’s-prison on the other, was a dreadful alternative. And so, when the meek and studious man whom Conger used for a partner called on him, he answered all his questions, and offered no objection to the assumption of the quiet man that Mr. Conger would carry on the case in his own fashion.
Many a man is willing to be a martyr till he sees the stake and fagots.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE TRIAL.
From the time that Charlton began to pettifog with his conscience, he began to lose peace of mind. His self-respect was impaired, and he became impatient, and chafed under his restraint. As the trial drew on, he was more than ever filled with questionings in regard to the course he should pursue. For conscience is like a pertinacious attorney. When a false decision is rendered, he is forever badgering the court with a bill of exceptions, with proposals to set aside, with motions for new trials, with applications for writs of appeal, with threats of a Higher Court, and even with contemptuous mutterings about impeachment. If Isa had not written to him, Albert might have regained his moral _aplomb_ in some other way than he did–he might not. For human sympathy is Christ’s own means of regenerating the earth. If you can not counsel, if you can not preach, if you can not get your timid lips to speak one word that will rebuke a man’s sin, you can at least show the fellowship of your heart with his. There is a great moral tonic in human brotherhood. Worried, desperate, feeling forsaken of God and man, it is not strange that Charlton should shut his teeth together and defy his scruples. He would use any key he could to get out into the sunlight again. He quoted all those old, half-true, half-false adages about the lawlessness of necessity and so on. Then, weary of fencing with himself, he wished for strength to stand at peace again, as when he turned his back on the temptations of his rescuers in Metropolisville. But he had grown weak and nervous from confinement–prisons do not strengthen the moral power–and he had moreover given way to dreaming about liberty until he was like a homesick child, who aggravates his impatience by dwelling much on the delightfulness of the meeting with old friends, and by counting the slow-moving days that intervene.
But there came, just the day before the trial, a letter with the post-mark “Metropolisville” on it. That post-mark always excited a curious feeling in him. He remembered with what boyish pride he had taken possession of his office, and how he delighted to stamp the post-mark on the letters. The address of this letter was not in his mother’s undecided penmanship–it was Isa Marlay’s straightforward and yet graceful writing, and the very sight of it gave him comfort. The letter was simply a news letter, a vicarious letter from Isabel because Mrs. Plausaby did not feel well enough to write; this is what Isa said it was, and what she believed it to be, but Charlton knew that Isa’s own friendly heart had planned it. And though it ran on about this and that unimportant matter of village intelligence, yet were its commonplace sentences about commonplace affairs like a fountain in the desert to the thirsty soul of the prisoner. I have read with fascination in an absurdly curious book that people of a very sensitive fiber can take a letter, the contents and writer of which are unknown, and by pressing it for a time against the forehead can see the writer and his surroundings. It took no spirit of divination in Charlton’s case. The trim and graceful figure of Isa Marlay, in perfectly fitting calico frock, with her whole dress in that harmonious relation of parts for which she was so remarkable, came before him. He knew that by this time she must have some dried grasses in the vases, and some well-preserved autumn leaves around the picture-frames. The letter said nothing about his trial, but its tone gave him assurance of friendly sympathy, and of a faith in him that could not be shaken. Somehow, by some recalling of old associations, and by some subtle influence of human sympathy, it swept the fogs away from the soul of Charlton, and he began to see his duty and to feel an inspiration toward the right. I said that the letter did not mention the trial, but it did. For when Charlton had read it twice, he happened to turn it over, and found a postscript on the fourth page of the sheet. I wonder if the habit which most women have of reserving their very best for the postscript comes from the housekeeper’s desire to have a good dessert. Here on the back Charlton read:
“P.8.–Mr. Gray, your Hoosier friend, called on me yesterday, and sent his regards. He told me how you refused to escape. I know you well enough to feel sure that you would not do anything mean or unmanly. I pray that God will sustain you on your trial, and make your innocence appear. I am sure you are innocent, though I can not understand it. Providence will overrule it all for good, I believe.”
Something in the simple-hearted faith of Isabel did him a world of good. He was in the open hall of the jail when he read it, and he walked about the prison, feeling strong enough now to cope with temptation. That very morning he had received a New Testament from a colporteur, and now, out of regard to Isa Marlay’s faith, maybe–out of some deeper feeling, possibly–he read the story of the trial and condemnation of Jesus. In his combative days he had read it for the sake of noting the