CHAPTER XXIV

.

JOHN CRAWFORD AND HIS NEPHEW--THE WRECK OF A WORKING MAN--THE EPISODE OF THE COCK--THE EFFECT OF JOSEPHINE HARRIS'S LETTER, AND AN EXODUS.

In order to demonstrate more clearly the state of affairs before existing at the house of John Crawford, and the effect really produced by the missive (it might almost as well have been called a _missile_) of Josephine Harris,--it will be necessary to change the point of view to the big house on the hill, at a little before noon on that pleasant Sunday of summer.

The back piazza of the house looked north and eastward over a slight depression which might almost be called a valley, and then at the range of hills rising behind and stretching downward on the other side almost to the Mohawk. Nearer, it looked out upon an extensive garden, carefully laid out and thriftily in growth with all the ground-fruits and vegetables natural to the climate, at that time in full luxuriance. Around the high board fences of the garden stood an almost endless variety of fruit-trees, the cherry-trees at that moment literally red, or black, or amber, as the case might be, with those delicious little globules of pulpy fruit-flesh which seem like drops of fragrant sweetness squeezed from the very heart of Nature. Among them stood apple and pear-trees, each loaded with the growing fruit of that wonderful fruit-season, in which the smile of God seemed resting broadly on the whole American continent in the wealth and variety of its productions, however his hand may have been smiting it with the desolations of personal strife and bloodshed.

Digressions have become so common during the course of this narration, that if the later ones are not excusable on the score of propriety, they at least have that excuse which is held to be so important by the lawyers and the statesmen--_precedent_. And having already sinned in that regard, beyond any hope of forgiveness and almost beyond any feeling of accountability for the erraticism of the pen--let us pause here, under the reminder of those hanging fruits in John Crawford's garden, to say that while perhaps no nation has ever before been so cursed with an extended civil war as this once free and happy republic during the past two years--yet no nation, plunged into any description of conflict, has ever been so favored of Heaven with the means for carrying it on and so delivered of Heaven from the dangers of famine and pestilence which so often accompany the other affliction.

At no period in the history of any nation in the world, could the statistics of that country exhibit the same amount of material wealth and power of production as those shown by the loyal States of the American Union at the moment of the breaking out of the Rebellion--the capabilities of the seceding States being left entirely out of the question. Private coffers and the vaults of our banks were alike full of gold, which had been for years flowing in and amassing from the mines of California and the favorable course of foreign exchanges. We had been feeding the world, and at the same time supplying ourselves and the world with more than half the precious metals yearly contributed to the hoards of the nations; and that the country should literally have become "full of money," was inevitable. But more especially did we hold power over the whole world in our capacities for fruit-growing and in our stores of breadstuffs already amassed. With proper management of our resources, the latter fact alone might have made the whole world tributary to us, and we could have dictated terms in war as well as in peace.

When a certain young Lieutenant in the British naval service, from the China fleet, crossed from Hong Kong to San Francisco on his way home on leave, in 1861, and then came by the overland route from San Francisco to New York, he fell into conversation in this city with a friend whom he had known in England; and as there were then rumors of trouble with Great Britain growing out of her expected help to the rebels, that conversation very naturally turned towards the relative wealth and power of the two countries.

"Well, I do hope," said the young English officer, "that there will not be any trouble between the two countries, because we don't want to fight you, you know!"

"And so do I," said his friend. "The _people_ of America do not bear any ill will to the people or the government of England."

"But we should beat you if we _did_ fight, you know," pursued the Englishman, with John Bull's tenacity of national pride.

"Think so?" asked the other, with the slightest suspicion of a sneer upon his lip.

"Oh, no, I don't think anything about it--I _know_ it," said the Englishman. "Why, you haven't got any navy."

"The deuce we haven't!" observed the other. "I guess you have not _seen_ our navy!"

"No!--nor has any one else seen an armament worthy of the name," said the Englishman, of course supposing that he referred to the dozen of old and worm-eaten wooden ships that then made up our whole preparation for contesting the empire of the seas. "Why any one of our half dozen fleets would eat up your whole navy in half an hour. If you had seen our Baltic fleet reviewed at Spithead, as I did just at the close of the Crimean war, you would know something of what the word 'navy' meant, and you would also have some idea, you know, of what a chance you would have at fighting England!"

"Humph! well, yes, you _have_ a pretty long string of vessels, such as they are," said his American friend. "But I told you that you did not know anything about _our_ navy, and you do not. You speak of the 'Baltic fleet.' Now what will you say when I tell you that at one point on the Mississippi we have a line of gun-boats that would knock not only your Baltic fleet but all the rest of your fleets into smithereens, without even firing a gun?"

"Why I should only say that you were crazy, as I think you _are_!" said the Englishman, really expecting that his friend would by-and-bye attempt to demonstrate that the easiest way of travelling was by walking on the head instead of the feet.

"Yes, I daresay you do," said the American. "And yet I am _not_ crazy. The only thing is that you do not yet understand me. The line of gun-boats of which I speak, is a line of warehouses at Chicago, containing at this moment from six to ten millions of bushels of grain, constantly emptying and constantly being replenished. _That_ is the line of gun-boats to fight the world, and we can conquer the world if we only use them correctly. We can live within ourselves, without buying one dollar's-worth of anything from any nation abroad, except possibly _tea_ (for we can make our own _coffee_ while we can grow _peas_ and _beans_); and there is not another nation on the globe that can do the same. Not a nation of you all but must have our breadstuffs or go hungry; and the sailors of your 'Baltic fleet' would not fight well, I fancy, on empty stomachs."

"Humph!" said the Englishman. "That is an odd view to take of war." But he said no more, and was evidently thinking. He had grounds for thought, and so had the whole world. We had the element of success in our own hands, in the capacity of living within ourselves. Had our resources been properly managed, the importation of all foreign goods prohibited during the period of the war, and the exportation of gold and breadstuffs forbidden and guarded against by the closest watch and the most stringent penalties, with our people practicing the self-denial and economy of the men and women of the Revolution, setting their spinning-wheels and looms once more in motion and wearing home-spuns instead of imported broadcloths and satins,--had these steps been taken, as they should have been taken, starvation would have fallen upon half Europe, and the rebellion would long before this time[15] have perished from its own weakness or been crushed out, from sheer necessity, by the European powers whose very existence its continuance was perilling.

[Footnote 15: March 7th, 1863.]

The smile of God has not been withdrawn from our fields and orchards; we have been continued in national health and still supplied with all the luxuries of production and abundance; and yet what is the use which we have made of these immense advantages, and what thanks have we rendered to the Supreme Being in those two most acceptable of worships, _labor_ and _success_, for the health and wealth thus given and continued?

But these reflections over, which have sprung from the fruit glistening on the trees in John Crawford's garden, the course of this narration reverts to two who occupied the back piazza of the mansion at that hour of Sunday noon. The piazza was a broad one, old-fashioned like the house, with pillars of locust, planed and cornered instead of being turned or fluted in the more modern fashion. Both the ends and the side for a considerable distance towards the centre, were enclosed by a low railing _in pale_; and the western end had lattice-work extending to the tops of the pillars, with the leaves and tendrils of a large grape-vine that had been planted many years before at the corner, running over, twisting and interlacing in the lattice, and making a pleasant flickering shade of the summer sunshine on the floor of the piazza. A few birds, not yet thoroughly exhausted by the noonday heat, were chirping in the thick branches of the fruit-trees near, and the drowsy hum and chirp of insect life made such a sleepy undertone as could not fail to bring rest and quiet to any mind not preternaturally active. A more charming place could not have been devised, for a half-dreamy and lazy student of either sex to sit down in an easy chair with a pleasant book, read and muse until the flickering of the sunshine and the shadows on the floor began to be blended with the type of the page, and then fall away to the lightest and happiest of slumbers.

There were two figures on the western end of the piazza, under the shade of the grape-vine. The first was that of an old man, sitting in a high-backed easy-chair, his feet upon a carpet-covered ottoman, leaning back, and if not in physical slumber, at least in that inertia of the mind which denotes failing physical faculties and marks a slumber more complete than that of shut eyes and stertorous breathing. Apparently he was very old, for his hair was thin and nearly white, as it showed from beneath the colored silk handkerchief thrown loosely over the back of his head; his skin had that shrivelled and wrinkled appearance, denoting that the life-fluids had been exhausted beneath it; his eyes, when opened, had that white opacity more melancholy than apparent blindness, because it shows a sight which after all takes in and recognizes nothing; and his thin lips had that constant tremulous motion which indicates a continual desire to speak, with scarcely the power of doing so and with little more than the remnants of a mind left to dictate what shall be uttered. John Crawford was, in short, a miserable human wreck, all its pride, beauty and power shorn and swept away, and drifting helplessly on to that lee-shore which is called death.

There was one peculiar feature of his situation which has not yet been named, and yet it was the most noticeable of all connected with him. From head to foot, sleeping or waking, at all times and under all circumstances, his nervous system was shaking and shivering, keeping the head in that continual quiver which is so melancholy to behold because it suggests involuntary labor that must exhaust and wear out the system, and making the weak hand so ungovernable that even the cup of tea put to his mouth required to be held and guided by others to prevent the contents being spilled and the vessel falling to the floor. Nothing could be more pitiable, when watched for a considerable time and when the impression forced itself upon the observer that at no single moment would that tremor ever grow still until the spoiler had completed his work, and the limbs should stiffen and straighten in the last chill of mortality.

And yet John Crawford was really by no means the very old man indicated by his white hairs, his dimmed eyes and his palsied shiverings. He was very little past sixty, and at an age when under ordinary circumstances several years of pleasant life might have been calculated upon. Nor was he the victim of constitutional disease, which had been fought and combatted until it had at last triumphed and brought down the torn banner of manhood trailing in the dust. And still less had a life of early indulgence and evil courses laid the mine for this after-destruction. He was not old to senility; he belonged to a family that had been noted for their long life, continued vigor and freedom from hereditary disease; and he had carefully avoided those errors in drink, food and personal indulgence which open the doors of life's citadel to the invader from beyond the dark valley. What, then, was the fatal secret? John Crawford was a suicide, and he had chosen a peculiarly American mode of self-immolation. Or perhaps it may with more propriety be said that he was a Faust in ordinary life, and that he had called upon a national demon to be his aid and his foe. He had _worked himself to death_--a phrase by many supposed to be hollow and unmeaning, but one too sadly illustrated every day in our modern life.

Born wealthy, he seemed to have imbibed with his earliest breath the impression that he was comparatively poor, and that only the most laborious drudgery of mind and body, to which the toil of the slave in the cotton-field is little more than play, could keep him from becoming still poorer. He had been a miser at once of his pennies and his hours, when a boy; and as he had grown older he had become a still worse miser in every opportunity for gain, and a reckless spendthrift of his own comfort and energy. No laborer on his farm had worked so many hours or so laboriously, the impression having seemed all the while to abide with him that if _he_ did not labor he would have only eye-service, and nothing would be left him. When others had slept, and he had been debarred from laboring with his hands, he had still toiled with his brain, turning restlessly on his bed when he should have slept, and planning to make his fertile acres still more productive or to add to them others that lay in tempting proximity. When hours of relaxation had been demanded by the calls of friendship, and even by the inexorable demands of his own system, he had shut his ears and refused, as if putting behind his back some tempter of the soul. Friends had said to him: "John, you are killing yourself!" or "John, you are working too hard and too steadily! Some day you will pay for all this." And one day a blunt-spoken rustic neighbor, observing him at his toil early and late, had said: "John Crawford, you are a fool! You do too much work! You have a fine constitution, and think that you can take liberties with it; but some day it will pay you, mark my words! You will find yourself, one fine morning, doubled up like an old horse that has been over-driven; and that will be the end of _you_! But go on, if you like it!"

John Crawford _had_ "gone on." He had married very late in life, principally on account of his belief that no man should marry until he had done his life-work and placed himself beyond anxiety on the score of property. When the day of his marriage came, after an engagement of nearly ten years, people had long been saying that the woman of his choice, his "Mary," had already worried away the best part of her life in anxiety for him and in fears for the final prevention of their union. Then, when the marriage was finally consummated and those who loved him best hoped that he would relax in his life-wearing toil, he had merely commenced to work the harder, because a married man needed to be better circumstanced than a single one! And when, five or six years after his marriage, and after giving birth to his one daughter and only child, Mary, his wife died, he had gone to work still harder, it seemed, as the only means of forgetting his bereavement! Rain or shine--early and late--year after year, he had labored on, enriching his lands and increasing his outbuildings, adding new acres and putting a few more thousands to those already out at interest on good bond-and-mortgage.

One day--some two years before the date of this story--the crash had come. The "old horse" had "doubled up." John Crawford had not come down to breakfast at his usual time, and those who went up to look after him had first discovered what ruin could do in a single night. The hale man of the night before had become a partial paralytic, helpless from that day forward--never again to lift hand in any employment, and scarcely permitted brain enough to realize all that he had won and all that he had lost. Gradually, afterwards, his mind had cleared and his speech returned, though feebly; but during all the two years his nervous prostration had been increasing and his bodily strength declining, until for weeks before that Sunday of July the physicians had pronounced him gradually dying and expected him to drop away at any moment.

Such was half the picture presented at the end of the piazza, the other half being made up of Colonel Egbert Crawford, his military coat changed to a blouse of brown linen and his boots replaced by a pair of embroidered slippers, but in all other regards quite as we have before seen him, and altogether the legitimate commander of the Two Hundredth Volunteers. During all his late visits to the farm, and especially since the defection and ostracism of Richard, he had made his "strong point" in paying great attention to the infirm old gentleman; and as personal attention is always pleasant and flattering, and more particularly so to the old, crippled, tedious and tiresome, he had succeeded in winning a place in the old man's regard, by this course, which he might have failed to secure by any other means.

On this particular morning he was rather well pleased than otherwise to see Mary throw on her flat and run out to make a call on some one of the neighbors, as this gave him an opportunity, on this his last day of probation, of making himself very devoted to his prospective father-in-law, without any serious drain upon his own personal comfort and energy. To wait upon the old man, after he had been got up and dressed for the morning and assisted out to the cool piazza, as in this instance--consisted of very little more than answering the few words which the invalid might happen to address him (and they were likely to be very few),--brushing away a troublesome fly when the old man sunk into a doze and the pest came too near his nose,--moving him a little if the sun happened to become troublesome through the vines,--or picking up and restoring a dropped handkerchief. The Colonel was rather well pleased to have something to employ him in this manner on this

## particular morning, especially when he could combine the employment

with a book and a lounge with his feet upon the piazza-railing; for the house was a little ticklish for indiscriminate roaming about, owing to the arrangements which he knew to be in progress. The dare-devil Major Lally, of the French revolutionary time, is said to have laid his head upon the block with many doubts as to the grace of his position, and with an apology to the executioner if he should have happened to transgress any of the rules of mortuary good-breeding,--on the ground that "he never had had his head cut off before;" and Colonel Egbert Crawford, never having been married before, may be excused if he had some sort of indefinite impression that all the rooms in the house were full of awful preparations, liable to be run against at any moment, and altogether fatal to matrimonial prospects if accidentally disturbed. So the piazza and the old man furnished him with a means of killing time that was "devilish dull," and at the same time with a certainty of being kept in a place where he could not possibly "run foul of anything" or do any harm.

The old man had scarcely spoken for half an hour. He had been lulled by the drowsy sounds of the summer noon, and by the growing listlessness of his own nature, into a few moments of doze, in which the Colonel, closing his eyes to the pages of his book, seemed on the point of joining him. Suddenly a rooster, that had strolled around from the barnyard and flown up to a cool location on the top of the garden fence, and under the shade of one of the cherry-trees (at which elevation no doubt his numerous harem in the yard regarded him with the same reverent respect paid to the Prophet Brigham, when at a distance, by his fifty-six wives and a fraction)--suddenly this rooster, forgetting the proprieties of the place and the hour, lazily flapped his big wings and emitted a crow of such magnificent dimensions as might have startled the whole neighborhood. Colonel Egbert Crawford started and opened his eyes: the old man straightened up his shaking head and did likewise. The sound was like an icy sword-blade thrust into a slumbering and tepid fountain--startling all the water spirits from repose and propriety,--or like Christmas suddenly obtruded, keen and pure, into the sluggish rest of midsummer. Of what the old man mused as his waking thoughts recognized the sound, can never be known--possibly of the wealth which he had garnered and of the broad lands over which that sound went ringing--all his own, but his own in what miserable mockery! Of what Colonel Egbert Crawford thought when the sound smote his ears, is much more certain. The cock-crow and _betrayal_! He had been brought up in the country, and many a time, in his younger and better days, when intercourse with the world had not yet developed the evil germ in his character, he had read and pondered over the mysterious connection between the cock, Shakspeare's "bird of dawning," and the scenes which preceded the Crucifixion. Remembering that the cock had seemed to appear and speak as the accuser of Peter, he had insensibly come to connect those events with the blacker guilt of Iscariot, and to look upon the bird as the watcher and detecter. In olden days this had not troubled him: perhaps it would not have done so, only four or five months before, when his hands were so much nearer stainless than they could be called at that hour. Now, on the verge of his marriage, and when the double tree of murder that he had planted (murder of character and murder of person!) was about bearing welcome and triumphant fruit, the rooster's cry, so sharp, sudden and unexpected, came to him like the voice of an accusing spirit. It may be taken as a proof of his cowardice when we say that momentarily his cheek whitened and his limbs trembled; and perhaps every criminal is a coward, because he dares not do right and trust the event with the overruling providences. But Egbert Crawford was no _physical_ coward, as we may have occasion to know before we have closed this relation. Yet he did whiten, and he did tremble. Was there something ominous in this sudden disturbance of the Sabbath quiet? Did it foreshadow another and a more startling disturbance, through which the dark, silent current of the river of guilt would be splashed into by the falling stones of the temple of error overhanging it? Was there in it an omen of the sudden flash of a bright and unendurable light through those black caverns, hitherto supposed to be impenetrable, where crawl the loathsome and slimy reptiles of deceit and treachery?

Pshaw! why should there be anything of this involved? Cocks had crowed before, even at noon-tide in summer, and the world had outlived the omen! Nevertheless the sound, especially so loud and grating a one, in which the bray of the donkey was so evenly mixed with the hideous scream of the peacock before rain, was an inopportune and impudent one; and the Colonel would have been very likely to wring chanticleer's neck if it had happened to come within the clutch of his fingers. As it was, he determined to cause an immediate abandonment of that stronghold, and sprung up to look for a club or a stone with which the enemy could be dislodged; when the rooster espying danger afar off, evacuated his Manassas before the enemy could reach him, and went back to his cackling harem. To them he no doubt related, in the appropriate language of the bipeds _with_ feathers, what a couple of sleepy-heads he had seen upon the piazza, and how he had startled them both with a voluntary upon his private organ. Meanwhile the Colonel had dropped back into his seat.

But old John Crawford, fully awakened by the sound, did not seem likely to fall away into slumber again. As Egbert resumed his place in the chair, the old man said, feebly:

"Egbert."

Instantly the Colonel, never forgetting his cue of attention to the invalid, drew closer to his side.

"Yes, Uncle, what can I do for you?"

"Where is Mary?" asked the old man, who had probably before asked the question half a dozen times since she had left the house.

"Gone out for a walk, Uncle," said the expectant son-in-law. "I suppose she is calling upon some of the neighbors. It is her last day, you know, Uncle."

"Her last day?--yes, you are going to be married to-night. I know," whispered the old man, with the air of a child to whom the intelligence has been communicated as a great secret--not that of a father who had thus willed for the happiness of a dear child.

"Domine Rodgers is to come at six," said the Colonel. "And then I hope I shall have the pleasure of calling you by a dearer name than that of Uncle."

"Yes, yes--Mary is a good girl," said the old man. "Take good care of her, Egbert. I am afraid I shan't live long, myself--not many years"--(Poor old man!--no efforts had been sufficient to awake him to the fact that his remaining time on the earth was probably to be measured by days or hours instead of years!) "I am going to have my will made, Egbert, the moment you are married, and I am going to leave all my property to her--_her_--her and you. You will have it all. Don't waste it, and don't let it go out of the family--not out of the family, Egbert! You are a Crawford, and I want to keep the property in the family. Eh, Egbert?"

"I will _try_ to do everything that you wish, Uncle!" said the Colonel; and no doubt that he really meant to obey that portion of his Uncle's injunctions--to _keep the property in the family_.

"And look here, Egbert," said the old man, who seemed to speak with less difficulty than was usual to him, though there were hindrances in his delivery very painful to the hearer and which we cannot caricature age and decrepitude by attempting to convey. "Look here--there is one thing more. Not a dollar to that scoundrel, Richard!--not a dollar, if he starves!"

"Not a dollar, Uncle; I promise you this, solemnly." And this promise, too, he meant to keep, beyond a question.

"And, Egbert, keep Mary away from him. Don't let him even see her if you can avoid it. They used to be together a great deal, and I don't know--I don't know!" What the old man did not know, must remain among the other mysteries not yet to be revealed. "Keep her away from him--don't let her go near him."

Though there were words in this last sentence of his Uncle's which did not entirely please the Colonel, yet there were others which did please him thoroughly. He made the third promise with the same alacrity. How easy the old man was making his path! To keep the property in the family (that meant, to keep it himself!) to give Richard no part of it under any circumstances (a thing not very likely)--and to keep his young wife from the presence of a man from whom he had only won her by the basest falsehood (a thing he was certain to do at all events)--these were the three injunctions: how easy to fulfil! The cup of the young man's content was at that moment brimming over, and the impudent chanticleer who only five minutes before had tortured him from the garden palings, was quite forgotten.

Just then there was a light foot-fall on the piazza behind the two speakers. The dulled senses of John Crawford were too dim to recognize it, but the keener faculties of the Colonel heard the beat of the little foot at once and knew it to be Mary's. He was just opening his mouth to say to his uncle, "Here is Mary, now!" when he caught a glimpse of her face; and then he remained gazing and said nothing. Mary had returned from her walk, had thrown off her bonnet, and stepped out to the piazza to look after the comfort of her father, and perhaps for some other purpose. She was at that moment just outside the door, and from the position of the Colonel, framed between the pillars at the other end of the piazza and against the dark green foliage of an arborvitae standing beyond. What was it that the quick eye of the Colonel saw, as he turned, that stopped the words upon his lips and made him look in silence on the young girl's face and figure? She had been absent from the house less than an hour--what could have occurred to her, within that space of time, to change their relative positions? And yet their relative positions _were_ changed--he felt the truth in an instant. He had parted with her less than two hours before--he the successful deceiver and she the blind victim. They met again, and she had gone beyond his power and his knowledge. We have often before had occasion, in the course of this narration, to speak of sudden changes in the human face and demeanor, so marked as to be absolutely startling. None of those changes could have been more marked than that shown by the face and figure of this young girl, as glanced at by the practiced eye of this man of the world. She looked taller, straighter in form, and no longer drooping and inelastic. Her glorious auburn hair was partially shaken loose from its confinement, as it had become during the exciting interview with Josephine Harris; and while the negligence added to the charm of her appearance, the very fact that she had not displayed a woman's coquetry in smoothing it rapidly into order before the glass when she threw off her bonnet, betrayed that she was much more awake and excited than usual. Was this on account of the near approach of the hour of her marriage? Egbert Crawford scarcely thought so, for the eye was not that of an expectant bride. That soft, sweet hazel eye still looked sad and troubled, but there seemed to be a spark of something fiercer and sharper than love, amid the trouble. Once more, what was it? Never before had she seemed so handsome, but never so unapproachable; and if the unscrupulous man had really held a true sentiment of love for her, at the bottom of all his selfish and evil designs (and who shall say that he had _not_?) there came the sharpest and deepest pang of his life in the first awakening of the thought that she was _slipping away from him_ even at the moment when he had apparently clutched her.

The Colonel, thoroughly mystified and a little alarmed, rose from his seat and was advancing towards the young girl, when she moved a pace towards him, her eyes first downcast and then even sternly raised to his face. She did not call him by name, nor wait until he had so addressed her, but held close to him, as if to avoid any possible observation, a small sealed note--and said, her voice trembling and husky:

"A private note for you. Please read it at once."

Passing by him without another word and without waiting for any reply, she advanced towards the end of the piazza where her father was sitting, and knelt down beside him. Colonel Egbert Crawford noted every feature of the movement, and saw that his fancy of the change in her appearance was not fancy alone. There _was_ something threatening. Mechanically he had taken the note as she had handed it to him and passed by. He glanced at the superscription, and though his wonder was increased, his fears of a rupture with Mary were partially dissipated, for the hand was totally unknown to him. Ha! he had it! The hand-writing on the note was that of a woman--the note had come to the house for him--she had seen it and conceived a sudden spasm of jealousy on account of it! How easily he could dissipate that idea by showing her the note, which he was certain could not be from any illicit female correspondent who had brought him within her power. The note was almost certain to be from some lady on professional business, or from the wife, sister or mother of some recruit who had enlisted in the famous Two Hundredth, asking for his influence towards a discharge or a furlough. He would show her the note at once, after he had read it, and with some kind of laughing excuse for showing it which would not betray the fact that he knew of her having any interest in it; and then this sudden but not dangerous hurricane would be over.

He glanced round at the pair on the end of the piazza, a smile of triumph on his face, as he came to this conclusion. Mary was kneeling beside her father, her back towards himself, fondling the old man's poor withered face, and paying so little attention to the man so soon to be her husband, that the jealousy hypothesis might have seemed well supported. What was it that the little girl had said to Josephine Harris, not half an hour before?--that "she could never meet Egbert Crawford after such a revelation?" Something of the kind, certainly. And she had met him, and unconsciously and without calculation gone through the very-brief interview in a manner worthy of the most finished actress--say of _La Heron, La Hoey_ or _La Bateman_, to name three of the most dissimilar but ablest representatives of dramatic character on the American stage. Oh, these little women, who make a boast of their weakness--there is very little that they cannot do when brought to the test!

Colonel Egbert Crawford tore open the note, walking towards the upper or eastern end of the piazza as he did so. His back was towards the two on the other end, and perhaps it was well that he should have been so positioned at that moment. Naturally, he glanced first at the bottom, and saw a name which he immediately recognized as that of one who had been _in the way_ sometimes at the Crawfords. He had never liked her, or held any more intercourse with her than was unavoidable with a very frequent guest at the same house with himself. He had considered her a little loud in voice, rather rapid, and a _fool_. He had been satisfied that she told all that she knew, and he would not have been surprised to find that sometimes she told considerably more. He had considered her utterly incapable of keen research, and the very last person in the world to keep a secret, supposing that such a thing could come into her possession. What did he find here, and from her?

He read that note three times over, standing on the extreme east end of the piazza, leaning against the corner-board of the house, and with his face so averted from those at the other end that even if Mary Crawford once or twice threw a quick glance around, she could see nothing. Then he turned, shoving the letter into his vest-pocket as he did so, and walked slowly down the piazza to the hall-door, his face calm, to all distant appearance, and whistling "_Strida la Vampa_."

If Mary Crawford had not before been able to see his movements, she arose from her knees as he came down the piazza, and saw him _then_. She saw him as he passed in at the hall-door, heard him whistle without an apparent tremor in a note, and heard his slippered steps as he slowly lounged up the stair towards the room on the second floor which had been for some months kept as his. The young girl was disappointed--astonished--astounded! She had seen no agitation--had heard and seen the indications of the opposite! The blow had not been effectual--it had either been feebly struck or delivered from a false aim! He was not guilty, or he was beyond fear and knew himself to be beyond the reach of public exposure! She had hoped too soon--the bond she dreaded was not broken or even deferred; and God help her, after all!

Such were the impressions of the young girl, as the man within a few hours to be her husband disappeared into the hall. Were they well founded? Ah, young eyes!--you may be schooled to do your part, very early, but you cannot at once be schooled to read the eyes of others aright. Perhaps you _never_ learn to read aright, until you lose the brightness of your own truth and beauty. Seventeen cannot well realize, to-night at Mrs. Pearl Dowlas's hop, when Mr. Pearl Dowlas, the eminent merchant, supposed to be worth a million, caresses his handsome side-whiskers with his faultless hand and interchanges pleasant nothings with the fashionable women who all admire him and all hate his wife,--that Mr. Pearl Dowlas is suffering, all the while, the intense agonies of ruin, and that he has the revolver already loaded and capped with which he intends to blow out his brains after the last carriage has rolled away. And Seventeen will be quite as slow to discover, unless Seventeen has lived too fast for her own self-respect and eventual happiness, that Lady Flora, patting her white-gloved hands to-night at the Opera, with the blonde Emperor by her side, apparently the happiest and the most truly envied woman in all that brilliant house, has such pangs of rage and jealousy tugging at her heart-strings, when she looks over at a much plainer woman in the opposite row of boxes, that could the terror of the law be removed, she would sacrifice self-respect, dignity, hope, everything, and bury a knife in the heart of that plainer woman as they brush by each other in the lobby. Seventeen will be slow to discover these things. Twenty-five may have a nearer appreciation of them, though yet dim as compared with the reality alas!--it needs Forty-five or Fifty, or a younger age made so old by sad experience--Forty-five or Fifty, with the bloom gone, the gray hair here and the wrinkles coming, to look beneath the surface and see the agony writhing at the bottom. Thank God that some agonies never can be discovered at all, until they break forth in uncontrollable madness: the world might be sadder if we _could_ look in through transparent flesh into our neighbors' hearts, as we do through glass windows into their houses!

"_Strida la Vampa_" had been bravely whistled. Not braver the conduct of the poor cartman at the hospital a few months ago, when he looked calmly on without a groan or a wince, while the surgeon sawed off the ends of the bone of his fractured arm, drilled holes through them and screwed them together with a fastening of gold wire! That was physical bravery, or perhaps stolid exemption from pain: this was that moral bravery, in a bad cause, but none the less real, which could see wholesale and undeniable ruin fall without betraying one sign of agony to the observer most interested. Though he had read that letter three times to fix the words in his mind, he had understood it at the first reading. It told him all that needed to be known. Mary's changed look and her averted face were now accounted for--accounted for at once and forever. No word of explanation was necessary and none would be given or demanded. Some men might have hesitated, and questioned whether the blow could not be softened or averted. This was not Egbert Crawford. He had played, boldly, wickedly and recklessly, though apparently with all care. At the very moment when he seemed to have won all, he had lost all. At the bar he had always been known as contesting a case unscrupulously and to the bitter end, but as giving up gracefully and bearing a defeat without complaint, _when_ defeated. A suspicion once aroused, and backed as was _this_ suspicion, the wearer of the eyes he had just seen could never again be deceived. Had he been less of a resolute man he might have dared the other threats of the young girl, perhaps impotent. But the one great stake lost, in the hand and fortune of Mary Crawford, there was nothing left to play for, worth even hazarding exposure.

We will not say that in his own chamber, and while changing his slippers for boots and his linen-wrapper to a coat more fit for the street, he did not more than once gnash his teeth, utter an oath below his breath, and curse the whole race of meddling women. But if he did so, he said nothing aloud; and if his dark brows were darker than usual, no human eye saw them. He had writing materials upon the table in that room--_that room_, the best in the house, and into which, on the night to follow, he had expected to be accompanied by _his bride_. He sat down at the table but a moment, but in that moment he dashed off, with a hand wonderfully steady under the circumstances, the following note:

SUNDAY, 1 P.M.

_Miss Harris_:--

You have meddled successfully, and whether you are right or wrong in what you allege, I shall not be here to contest the question. If your husband, if you ever get one, keeps half as close a watch over you, he will probably see quite enough to satisfy him. Perhaps you will be kind enough to communicate _this_ to Miss Mary Crawford, and thus finish the obligations under which I rest.

Yours, humbly,

EGBERT CRAWFORD.

In a moment more this note was sealed and directed to "Miss Josephine Harris--Care of Miss Crawford" and left lying on the table, with the superscription upward. Then Colonel Egbert Crawford put on his hat, walked deliberately down-stairs and out at the front of the house. No one seemed to observe him--not even a domestic, and probably nothing would have pleased him better at that moment. Walking down the lane to the road, he turned up the road to the left, went up to a little country tavern where he had sometimes hired a riding-horse on previous visits, and hired a horse and buggy, with a driver, to go at once to Utica. Ten minutes completed the negotiation, and ten more harnessed up the horse to the vehicle; so that before the call to dinner was made at the Crawford mansion, before old John Crawford was assisted in from the portico, or Mary thought of the arbiter of her destiny as elsewhere than in his own room,--he was bowling down the dusty road towards Utica. When the down-train from Suspension Bridge left Utica for Albany that afternoon, the detected and beaten gambler in reputations, lives and matrimonial ventures, was a passenger.

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