CHAPTER V.
THE BIRTH AND BLOOD OF THE BRANDS--PRIDE THAT CAME DOWN FROM THE CRUSADES--ROBERT BRAND AS SOLDIER AND PENSION-AGENT--THE PENSIONERS OF THE REVOLUTION--HOW ELSIE RAVED, AND HOW THE FATHER'S CURSE SEEMED TO BE ANSWERED--DR. JAMES HOLTON, AND THE LOSS OF A CORPUS DELICTI.
It has already been indicated, in speaking of the ties which bound ElspethGraeme to the Brand family, that they were Scots by descent as she was byboth blood and birth. Robert Brand himself stood in the fourth remove fromGaelic nativity, without the spirit of his race being extinct or evenmodified. When Archibald Alexander, father of that William Alexander whoclaimed to be Earl of Stirling in the peerage of Scotland while he wasgallantly fighting as a Major-General in the patriot army of theRevolution, came to America in 1740, he was accompanied by a man whoclaimed to hold quite as good blood as himself, though he served in littleless than a menial capacity to the heir of the attainted house ofStirling. This was Malcolm Brand, of Perthshire, a member of the Scottishand elder branch of the Brands of Hertfordshire in England, who at a laterday carried the two crossed swords which they had borne on their shieldssince the Crusades, to augment the threatening bulls, wolves and leopardsof the Dacres, in the possession of that barony. It was in a victorioushand-to-hand fight with a gigantic Saracen on the field of Askalon, thatGawin de Brande, laird of Westenro in Lothian, fighting close beside KingRichard, won that proud quartering of arms; and it is to be believed thatno descendant of his blood, either in 1740 or in 1863, had quite forgottenthat exploit or the fact that the very name of the family was only anotherantique appellation for the sword.
Malcolm Brand, the emigrant, was the father of a son Robert, born in NewJersey, as Archibald Alexander was the sire of William, who so proudlyoutdid the exploits of his elder blood, fighting under the leadership ofWashington. The two young men, resident nearly together among the NewJersey hills, entered the army at the same time, and while the one rose tothe dignity of a Major-General, the other shared in his combats at LongIsland, Germantown and Monmouth, always fighting gallantly, but neverrising beyond the grade of a first-lieutenant, and dying at last a prisoneron one of the pest-ships of the Wallabout. His son William, named afterLord Stirling and born in 1768, had of course passed as a boy through thetrying period of the great contest, known that identification with thepatriot cause inevitable from anxiety for a father engaged in it and griefover his lingering death by disease and privation for its sake; and itcould not be otherwise than that the ears of _his_ son, Robert (the man of1863), should have been filled with relations calculated at once to keepalive the pride of his blood and to identify him with the glory and honorof the land in which his lot had been cast.
Then had come another influence, not less potent--the second breaking-outof hostilities against England, in the War of 1812. The blood of the Brandswas not cooled--it sprung to arms; and Robert Brand, then a young lawyer,taking the place of his father already invalided, assumed the sword of hisarmorial bearings and fought with Scott at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane,receiving so terrible an injury in the leg, at the close of the latterbattle, that he was to be a tortured cripple from that day forward, butglorying even in the disablement and the suffering, because his injury hadnot been met in some trivial accident of peaceful life, but sustained wherebrave men dared their doom.
And yet another influence, not less potent, was still to come. Years after,when Carlton Brand was a child in arms, his father, then a practisinglawyer in his native State, became identified with that most romantic andmost picturesque body of men, of whom the present age remembers but little,and of whom the age to come will know nothing except as the knowledge ishanded down from father to son, or carried forward in such desultoryrecords as these--_The Pensioners of the Revolution_. At that time, notless on account of his spotless reputation than the crippling woundreceived in the service, he was appointed Pension Agent for the section inwhich he resided, and duly commissioned twice a year to receive from theWar Department and pay over to the old men the somewhat scant and verytardy pay with which the land of Washington at last smoothed the passage tothe grave of those who had been his companions.
It was Robert Brand's privilege, then, to meet those men in the familiarintercourse of business--to listen to their tales, so often slighted bythose wiser or less reverent, of foughten field and toilsome march, ofcheerless camp and suffering in the wilderness, when this giant nation wasa wilful child unjustly scourged by a tyrant mother--to find in each somereminder of his patriot grandfather, and some suggestion of what thatgrandfather would have been had the fortune of war spared him to go downinto old age and senility.
Twice a year, as the pension day came round, one by one they gathered inthe little room where the scanty pension was to be doled--each with themeasured beat of his stick sounding upon the floor as he entered, regularlyas when his foot had beaten time in the olden days, under the iron rain ofPrinceton, or on the suffering march to Valley Forge. One by one theygathered to what was their great semi-annual holiday, with the kindlygreetings of garrulous and failing age--with the gentle complaint, sopatiently uttered, over limbs that seemed to be bowing with the weight oftime, and with the pardonable boast that it was not so when the speaker hadbeen young, in such a winter on the Northern Lines, or with such an officerat Yorktown or Saratoga. When the winters--said they--were colder than theyare now, when the men were hardier, and when the women (they had all longbefore gone to rest, in the family graveyard or the little plat beside thechurch,) were fairer far than their daughters ever grew!
Harmless deception of age!--pleasant coloring that distance gives in timeas well as in the material world, so that the forms we once loved may beeven more beautiful in thought than they were in reality; the grassy lawnsupon which we played in childhood, greener far in memory than they everwere beneath the sun of June; and even those hours once filled with anxietyand vexation, so beguiled out of their uncomely features, that they have nopower to harm us in after-thought, and almost seem to have been freightedwith unalloyed happiness! There may have been a thunder-cloud rising in theheavens, that afternoon when we went boating with Harry and Tom and Maryand Susan and Alice, all the way down from Lovers' Bend to the Isle ofKisses, with music, and laughter and loving words that were sweeter farthan song; and the thunder-cloud may have thickened and gathered, so thatthe young lovers were drenched and very dismal-looking, long before theirreturn at evening; but be sure that forty years after, when the day isremembered, only the sunshine, the smiling faces and the flashing water isseen, and if the thunder-storm has a place in memory at all, it comes backmore as a pleasure than a disappointment. Mary may have had a cloud uponher brow, that evening at the garden-gate, from the absence of a ribbonlightly promised, or the presence of a recollection how some one flirtedwith Julia on the evening before; and there may even have been a tiffverging far towards a lover's quarrel, before the reconciliation and theparting under the moon; but when the hair has grown gray, and Mary is withthe millions sleeping in the breast of our common mother, only themoonlight, that dear last kiss, and the rapture of happy love areremembered, and that checkered hour is looked back upon as one of unmixedenjoyment. Time is the flatterer of memory, as well as the consoler ofgrief, and perhaps has no holier office. So it was well that the old men'smental eyes were dim when their physical vision was failing; and when wegrow old as they, if the scythe of the destroyer cut us not away longbefore, may the far-away past be gilded for us as it was for them, by therosy hue of fading remembrance, until all the asperities, the hardrealities, the sharp and salient edges and angles of life, are smoothed andworn away forever!
Sitting side by side, they talked--those bent and worn and gray old men--ofscenes long matters of honored history, glorying (ah! honest and naturalglory!) in having stood guard at the tent of Wayne, or shared the coarsefare of Sumter in the Southern woods, but most of all if happily the eye ofWashington had chanced to beam upon them, and his lips (those lips thatseldom broadly smiled) approved or thanked t
heir honest service. Few men,even of those who fought beside him, seemed ever to have known a smile fromthe Father of his Country; but for those few there always beamed a light ofglorious memory to which the all-repaying word and the intoxicating smileof the Great Corsican would have been empty and valueless.
It was easy, twenty or thirty years afterwards, to remember the fire thatblazed in the dim eyes of old Job Marston, as he told how Washingtoncommended him for his good conduct on the afternoon of the dreadful day ofLong Island, when Sullivan's legion broke and fled like frightenedsheep,--and how the veteran straightened himself upon his staff as if thehead which had once borne the praise of the Joshua of American Libertyshould scarcely bend even to time. Or the quivering of the hand of WalterThorne, one of the men who bore, through every trial and danger, the pledgeof faith of the Monmouth League--quivering yet with the anger which hadbrooded for more than fifty years,--as he pictured so plainly the burningof his father's house by the Refugees, the acres of broad land laid wasteby them, the cattle driven towards the royal lines from his own homestead,the arming of his friends, the chase, the recapture, and the ghastly figureof the Refugee captain as they hung him on a spreading limb that spannedthe road, a sacrifice not only for the home in ashes but to the manes ofCaptain Huddy, scarcely yet taken down from his oak-tree gallows on theheights of Navesink. Or the quietly felicitous chuckle with which StephenHolmes, who had been one of "Captain Huyler's men" in the operations ofthat patriot marine freebooter around the shores of the lower bay of NewYork, detailed the success of a night attack in boats pretending to carrylive-stock and oysters for sale, by which one vessel of the British fleetlying in the bay was captured, much welcome spoil fell into their hands forthe use of needy families at home, and all the remaining vessels of thesquadron rode uncomfortably in the bay for a long time after. Or the halfplayful and half indignant raising of the cane of Robert Grey, when told byhis old companions, for the five-hundredth time beyond a doubt, that he wassuspected of a share in Arnold's treason, for not stopping the disguisedAndre as he passed his sentinel post below West Point, before he fell intothe hands of the three very common and insignificant men made immortal byone single act--Williams, Paulding and Van Wert. There would have been nopretence in the motion, spite of his eighty years and faltering limbs, hadthe speaker hazarded more than a jest against the faithfulness of the oldman's service in the "dark day." But easiest of all was it to remember thestory of Thomas West, wounded, and crippled from that day forth, inassisting to bear the wounded Lafayette from the field of Brandywine, andnamed a subaltern officer at the close of that memorable action. His wasthe seat of honor; and his was something more, even, than that measure ofrespect demanded by all and so cheerfully paid to white hairs and honorablescars.
Seldom was there a voice to speak one word of disrespect or undervaluationin the old men's company; and though the privilege of garrulous and failingage was often taken, and though the story once full of life and interestgrew sadly tedious when again and again repeated,--yet there was no pardon,and deserved to be none, for him who forgot that reverence due to the menwho bore the last personal recollections of the seven-years war. Only once,within the experience of Robert Brand as a Pension Agent, was suchdisrespect shown; and then the punishment was so signal that there were nofears of the impropriety being repeated. Mart Tunison, a wealthy younglandowner, rudely jostled old Job Marston on one occasion, and when calledto account for the offence, snapped his fingers at the veteran as a "cursedold humbug, always in the way and always telling stories of battles he hadnever seen." "You are rich, they say, Mart Tunison," said the old man,while the younger one could not read the flash that still lived in hisfaded eye. "I _am_ rich, and what is that to you, grand-daddy?" was theanswer, with a slap of the hand on the jingling pocket. "Yes, you are rich,and most people do not know how you became so!" almost hissed the old man,little knowing how he was pointing a moral for a future day by speaking ofthe "shoddy" of that by-gone time. "I will tell all your friends, and you,how you got so stuffed up that you can snap your fingers in an old man'sface! You are living on the proceeds of the money that your Torygrandfather, old Tom Tunison, made by stealing cattle, when he was one ofthe Refugee Cow-Boys, and driving them over the lines to sell to theBritish, before he ran away to Nova Scotia to save his neck!" Mart Tunison,if he had ever before known the real origin of his wealth, which isdoubtful,--would probably have given the best field of all his broad landsto prevent that revelation of the shame of his family, which afterwardsfollowed him like a thing of ill-omen, to the very grave!
There was at that time in the office of Robert Brand, a stripling youngsterwho promised very little good to the world and has probably as yetdisappointed no one--who thought more of play than of work, of music thanof mortgages, of Burns than Blackstone, and of a rosy-cheeked girl who cameinto the office on some little errand to the "'Squire" than of the mostproud and stately of his male clients. Among his vices, he had a fancy forjingling verse; and one day when the semi-annual visit of the pensionershad just terminated and he had listened afresh to the same old tales ofglory told over again in the same faltering accents that he had heard somany times before, his one virtue of reverence for the aged and thevenerable rose into an idle rhyme, which may have a fit place in thisconnection, and which he called
THE PENSIONERS.
They come but twice a year, When the pension-day rolls round,-- Old men with hoary hair And their faces to the ground. One leans upon his crutch; And one is upright still, As if he bore Time's clutch With an iron nerve and will.
And feeble are the steps That so patiently they feel; And they kiss with trembling lips The old Bible and the seal; And they lay with care away, In wallets old and worn, The scant and tardy pay Of a life of toil and scorn.
They love a cheerful pipe And a warm place in the sun, From an age so old and ripe To call memories one by one;-- To tell of Arnold's crime, And of Washington's proud form That beamed, in battle time, A beacon o'er the storm.--
To tell of Yorktown's day, When the closing fight was gained,-- When Cornwallis went away And the eagle was unchained; To show us, o'er and o'er, The seamed and withered scars That many a hero bore, As his passport from the wars.
'Tis pride, with these old men, To tell what they have seen, Of battle-fields, again With their harvest bright and green: 'Twill be pride, when we are old, To say that in our youth We heard the tales they told And looked on them in their truth.
They are the last sad link Of a race of men with ours, Who stood on ruin's brink And built up fair freedom's towers. They are passing, as the foam From the ocean wave departs, But finding yet a home In heaven, and in our hearts.
And when the last is gone, To their memory we will build A pyramid of stone Whose top the sun shall gild When the name of patriot weal And of tyrants' bitter wrong Shall be told but in a tale And known but in a song.
The time then prophesied has come; though the monument then promised hasnot been erected, and though it may never be, because a later and granderthough scarce nobler struggle to preserve what was then first created,almost dwarfs the memory of the first contest and demands all the resourcesof wealth and art for its commemoration. The Pensioners of the Revolutionare all gone, long ago, on the line of march to that great meeting wherethe last pension, whether of good or evil, shall be told out.
Almost every year, beneath the eye of the Pension Agent, one more witheredleaf would drop from the bough where it had feebly fluttered, and sadcomments be made by the survivors when they met, with: "Ah,well-a-day!--poor ---- is gone!" and "Well, we are very old, and we mustall follow him--some day!" with nervous shakings of the head and tremblingsof the palsied hand, that told to all but themselves how soon the end mustcome. Thinner and thinner grew the group, reduced to six--to four--tothree--to two! Oh
, that sad, mournful, heart-breaking two!--enough gone tomark the coming extinction; enough still left to hold their melancholyconverse! And then one day there came but _one_, who looked vacantly roundon the empty space and seemed to remember that others than himself mustonce have been there, but to remember no more. The "Last Man" had not thenbeen written, and _Geoffry Dale_ was yet to spring from the imagination orthe memory of the dramatist and supply poor _Jesse Rural_ Blake with one ofhis best opportunities for throat-choking pathos; but in the last of thepensioners his history was sadly prefigured. One other lonely visit, andthen the survivor was gone. All the group had dropped away. Their formsseemed to linger, long after the forms that cast them had mouldered intoimpalpable dust. It was the most natural thing in life for Robert Brand,months and even years after, to turn when hearing the measured beat of anold man's cane upon the floor, and look to see if the comer was not one ofthe veterans of Yorktown or of Trenton, yet lingering far behind the timeof his companions. But no--death had come to all, and as yet noresurrection. The last pittance had been paid them, and laid away for thelast time by their careful fingers; and they, too, had been laid away bythe hoarding miser of human forms, in quiet graves in those humble countrychurch-yards dotting the bosom of that land which they had helped to freeand to cover with human glory!
Perhaps they died in good time--before the dark hour came back again aftera glorious morning and a cloudless noon. Perhaps it is well that the lastof the Revolutionary veterans had passed beyond acute pain and heart-feltshame, before the attempt at national suicide came to embitter their lastmoments with the belief that after all they might have labored and sufferedin vain. But their memory does not die. Mecca and Jerusalem are blended inthe sacredness of that pilgrimage which the reverent heart travels backthrough the years to pay them; and if there is yet a leaven ofself-sacrificing devotion in our national character sufficient to bear uson triumphantly to the great end, the yeast of true patriotism from whichit is made was preserved through the long night of corruption and misrule,in the breasts of the Fathers of the Republic.
Their children have long been old men now. Their very grandchildren beginto show gray hairs. Following close upon the steps of the Last Man of theRevolution--the last of the men who could say that they saw and took partin that throe which gave birth to a nation,--tread all those who can evensay that they ever saw them and took them by the hand. A few years, and thelast of these, too, will be quiet and voiceless. The chain of personalrecollection is growing thin,--it may break to-morrow; and "the rest issilence."
Such was the blood of Robert Brand, and such had been the influences andsurroundings of his earlier life--himself a soldier when in possession ofhealth and vigor, and the companion, friend and guardian of the noblest ofall American soldiery when he became disabled and inactive. He loved hisnative land with an idolatry bordering on insanity; and during the longstruggle between the interests of the sections, preceding the war, he hadimbibed love of free institutions and hatred of slavery to a degree littleless than fanatical. No regret had weighed so heavily upon him, when thenote of conflict sounded in 1861, as the fact that his aged and crippledframe must prevent his striking one blow in a cause so holy; and if he heldone pride more dearly than another, it was to be found in the remembrancethat he had a noble and gallant son, too busy and too much needed at home,thus far, to join the ranks of his country's defenders in the field, butready when the day of positive need should come, to maintain unsullied thehonor of his race. What marvel, all these surroundings considered, that theknowledge of that son being an abject poltroon should nearly have unseatedhis reason, and that he should have uttered words which only the partialinsanity of wounded pride and rankling shame could supply with any shadowof excuse?
At the close of the last chapter, and before this long explanatory episodeintervened to break the progress of the narration, Elsie Brand, theagonized sister and daughter, was seen standing before her father, withhands clasped in agony and lips uttering agonized pleadings. But the veryinstant after, when the terrible severity of that parental curse had beenfully rounded from the lips and that fatal evidence given that for themoment all natural affection had given way to impious rage anddenunciation,--the young girl stood erect, her blue eyes still tearful butflashing anger of which they commonly seemed to be little capable, and herlips uttering words as determined as those of the madman, even if they wereless furious and vindictive:
"You may strike me if you like, but I do not care for you, now--not onesnap of my finger! You are not my father--you are nobody's father, but abad, wicked, unfeeling old man, gray headed enough to know better, and yetcursing your own flesh and blood as if you wished to go to perditionyourself and carry everybody else along with you!"
The very audacity of this speech partially sobered the enraged man, and heonly ejaculated in a lower but still angry tone:
"What!"
"What I say and what I mean!" the young girl went on, oblivious or heedlessof any parental authority at the moment. "I do not love you--I hate andshudder at you! I would rather be my poor brother, a coward and disgracedas he may be, than his miserable father cursing him like a brute!"
"Do you dare----" the father began to say, in a louder voice and with thethunder again threatening, but Elsie Brand was proving, just then, that thegift of heedless speech "ran in the family," and that for the moment she"had the floor" in the contest of denunciation.
"Oh, you need not look at me in that manner!" she said, marking theexpression of the old man's eyes and conscious that he might at any momentrecover himself sufficiently to pour out upon her, for her unpardonableimpudence, quite as bitter a denunciation as he had lately vented againsther disgraced brother. "I am not afraid of your eyes, or of your tongue.You have turned Carlton out of doors, for a mere nothing, and I am goingwith him. I will never set foot in this house again, never, until----"
How long was the period the indignant girl intended to set for her absence,must ever remain in doubt, with many other things of much more consequence;for the sentence thus begun, was never completed. In at the open frontdoor, through the parlor and into the room of the invalid, at that momentstaggered Kitty Hood. The phrase descriptive of her movement is usedadvisedly and with good reason; for fright, exhaustion and the terribleheat of the June meridian had reduced the young school-mistress to a mostpitiable condition. Her face was one red glow, her brow streamed withperspiration, and she was equally destitute of strength and out of breath.
This strange and unannounced interruption naturally broke the unpleasantchain of conversation between father and daughter; and the eyes of both,during her moment of enforced silence to recover breath, looked upon herwith equal wonder and alarm.
"Oh, Mr. Brand!" and here the breath gave out again and she sank exhaustedinto the chair which Elsie pushed up to her.
"You are sick? Somebody has insulted or hurt you? What _is_ the matter,Kitty?" she asked.
"Oh, no, no!" at last the school-mistress mustered breath to say, at short,jerky intervals. "Nothing ails _me_, except that I am out of breath; butyour son, Mr. Brand."
"Well, what of _him_?" asked the old man, his tone sharp and angry and hisbrow frowning, confident that the coming information must have someconnection with the disgraceful report of the morning--that Kitty Hood hadonly run herself out of breath in her anxiety to tell his family unwelcomenews that they already knew too well.
"Oh, sir, Mr. Carlton--your poor brother, Elsie!--is dead!"
"Dead!" The word had two echoes--one, from the lips of Robert Brand, littleelse than a groan; and the other from poor tortured Elsie, compoundedbetween groan and shriek.
"Oh, yes, how can I tell it?" the young school-mistress went on, as fast asher broken breath would allow. "I found him lying dead, only a little whileago, by the gate, down at the blind-road, as I came across from school;and I have run all the way here to tell you!"
"My poor brother dead! oh, Carlton!" moaned Elsie Brand; then, but aninstant after, and before the old man had foun
d time to speak again, thecurse came up in connection with the bereavement and she broke out,hysterically: "See what you have done, father! You wished poor Carltondead, and now you have your cruel wish! Oh, my poor, poor brother!"
"Silence, girl!" spoke Robert Brand, sharply, with a not unnatural disliketo have the school-mistress made aware of what had so lately passed. Theold man was terribly affected, but he managed to control himself and tospeak with some approach to calmness.
"You are sure, Kitty, that you saw my son lying dead?"
"Oh, yes, Mr. Brand, he was lying dead on the grass close by the gate."
"Lying alone?" The voice of the father trembled, in spite of himself, as heasked the question.
"All alone, and he could only have been dead a few moments. He looked so."
"Was there--" and the old lawyer tried to steady his voice as he had many atime before done when asking equally solemn questions concerning the fateof other men's children--"did you see any thing to prove what killed him?He went away from home on horseback--"
"Yes, he was on horseback at Mrs. Hayley's only a little while ago," Elsiemustered strength to interrupt.
"Did you see his horse?--had he fallen from it--or--" and then the voice ofthe father, who but a few moments before had believed his love for his soncrushed out forever, entirely broke down. Heaven only knew the agony of thequestion he was attempting to put; for the thought had taken possession ofhim that that son, overwhelmed by the knowledge that he would be pointedout and scoffed as a poltroon, had shown his second lack of courage bylaying violent hands on his own life and rushing unbidden into thepresence of his Maker!
"No," answered Kitty Hood, setting her teeth hard as she realized that thetime had come when she must prove her own honesty at the possible sacrificeof the life of the man who had been her lover. "No, I did not see hishorse. He had not been killed by falling from it, I am sure. He had been_murdered_!"
"Murdered!" Again the word was a double echo from the very dissimilarvoices of father and daughter; the latter speaking in the terror of thethought, the former under the conviction that the dreadful truth was beingrevealed, and that, though the young girl did not suspect the fact, thecrime would be found to have been _self_-murder.
"There was blood on his face and on the grass," poor Kitty went on, "andthere was a bundle lying close beside him, that I had seen under the armof--of--"
"Eh, what? Under whose arm?" asked the father, in a quick voice, as therelation took this new turn.
"Richard Compton's!" choked out Kitty Hood.
"Richard Compton's!" again echoed the old man. "Why he was your--"
"We were engaged to be married," cried poor Kitty, at last overwrought andbursting into tears. "But I must tell the truth, even if it hangs him andbreaks my heart. He was at the school-house only a little while before; hewas angry with Mr. Carlton, and threatened him; and I am afraid that hekilled him."
"Oh, this is dreadful!" said Elsie.
"Dreadful indeed!" replied Robert Brand, whose own grief and horror weresomewhat modified if not lessened by the thought in what a situation thehonest young girl was placing herself and her lover. He reached back andpulled the bell-rope again, and again Elspeth Graeme made her appearance, alittle surprised to find three persons in the room where she had beforeleft but two, the third coming unannounced, and all three of the faceslooking as if their owners had been summoned to execution.
"Tell Stephen to get up the large carriage, instantly, and have it roundwithin five minutes," was the order to the old woman, delivered in a quickand agitated voice.
"Are ye gaein' out, sir?" was the inquiry, in reply.
"Yes, but what is that to you, woman?"
"Naethin', maybe, only you're clean daft if ye'r thinkin' of it, Mr. RobertBrand."
"I am not only thinking of it but going to do it; and the quicker you do mybidding, the better."
"Gang yer ways, then, for an uncanny, unmanageable auld ne'er-do-weel!" wasthe grumbling comment of the Scotch woman, as she prepared to obey theinjunction. She strode half way through the parlor, then returned and firedanother shot into the invalid's room before she finally departed: "Hech,but ye've been sendin' away the doctor wi' the grin on his grunzie, andwha' will I ca' when ye come back a' ram-feezled and done over--answer methat, noo!"
Less than five minutes sufficed to bring the carriage to the door, with itsteam of well-groomed bays, and with much exertion (of which the stalwartElspeth furnished no small proportion) the invalid was placed in it and sosurrounded with cushions that he could ride with comparative ease. Elsie'stearful request to be allowed to accompany him in his quest of the body ofher brother was sharply denied, with orders that both Kitty and herselfshould remain within the house until his return; and the carriage droverapidly away towards the point designated by the school-mistress, while thehousekeeper was learning the fearful tidings from the lips of the twogirls, and uttering broken laments and raining tears down her coarsecheeks, over "her winsome bairn that had been sae sair wanchancie!"
Scarcely more time than had been consumed in getting ready the vehicleelapsed before the carriage, driven at rapid speed, dashed up to the spotthat had been indicated by Kitty, the eyes of the father looking out inadvance with an indescribable horror, to catch the first glimpse of thebody of a son whom he half accused himself, in his own heart, of murdering.A doctor's top-sulky and a saddled horse, with two men, were seen standingnear the gate as they approached; but, strangely enough, they saw no deadbody. One of these men, Robert Brand saw, was the young farmer, RichardCompton, who had been accused by Kitty of committing that terrible crime;the other, standing by the side of his professional sulky, was a man oftwenty-five, of medium height, very carefully dressed, fair faced, darkhaired and dark eyed, with features well rounded and an inexpressibly sweetsmile about the handsome mouth, which might have made an impression, underproper circumstances, upon other hearts than the susceptible one of ElsieBrand. Dr. James Holton, as has before been said, was a young physician, invery moderate practice, pleasing though very quiet in manners,irreproachable in character (an unpopular point, as we are all well aware,in one of the heroes of any tale), and considered very much more eligibleas a match by the young lady with whom his name has before been connected,than by the parent who was supposed to have the disposal of her hand. Dr.Holton, as many people believed, possessed skill enough and wassufficiently attentive and studious in his profession, to have run a closerrace with the local professional autocrat, Dr. Pomeroy, than he had yetbeen able to do, but for the skilfully managed sneers and quietundervaluations by which the elder had kept him from winning publicconfidence. For more than two years he had been a frequent visitor atRobert Brand's, received with undisguised pleasure by Elsie and treatedwith great consideration by her brother, but meeting from the respectedhead of the family that peculiar treatment which can no more be construedinto cordiality than insult, and which says, quite as plainly as wordscould speak, "You are a respectable young man enough, and may be receivedwith politeness as a visitor; but you do not amount to enough in theworld, ever to become a member of my family." Quarrel as he might with Dr.Philip Pomeroy, the old gentleman persisted in retaining him as his medicaladviser; and it was her knowledge of the antagonism between the two and ofthe estimation in which each was held, that had induced the housekeeper tomake her parting suggestion of the effect which must follow his order toset the dog on Pomeroy if he ever again attempted to approach the house. Noone, meanwhile, could better appreciate his own position than Dr. JamesHolton; and while well aware that he loved Elsie Brand dearly, and firmlybelieving that she held towards him an unwavering affection, he was contentto wait until his fortunes should so improve as to make him a more eligiblematch for her, or until in some other providential manner the obstacles totheir union might be removed.
Such was the gentleman who approached Robert Brand's carriage door with abow, the moment the coachman had reined up his horses, and while thatgentleman was looking around with fearful anxiety for
an object which hiseyes did not discover.
"We are in trouble about your son," he said, before the other had spoken."Something very extraordinary has occurred. Have you heard--"
"That my son was killed and lying here? Yes. Miss Kitty Hood, theschool-mistress, saw the body as she passed, and came to inform me."
"Kitty Hood!" gasped Richard Compton, turning from the fence against whichhe had been leaning, and exhibiting a face nearly as white as thattraditionally supposed to belong to a ghost.
"Is it true?" continued the father. "If so, where is the body?"
"That is what puzzles us," answered the physician. "Mr. Compton, here, hadan altercation with your son--"
"Excuse me, Doctor, for telling the story myself," said the farmer,interrupting. "Altercation is not the word--it was a _fight_. The devilwas in me, I suppose, and I insulted Carlton Brand like a fool, and daredhim to get off his horse to fight me. He got off, we exchanged a few blows,and directly he knocked me stiff. Perhaps I hit him in some unlucky placeat the same time--I do not know. All that I do know is, that when I got mysenses again, he lay stiff as a poker there on the grass. I thought himdead or dying, and rode away on his horse for the doctor. When we got here,just a moment ago, the body, or Mr. Carlton Brand with the life in him--theLord knows which!--was gone."
"My son got off his horse to fight you, you say?" asked Robert Brand, insuch a tone of interest as almost seemed to be exulting.
"Yes, sir," answered the farmer.
"And actually fought you?--do not tell me a falsehood on this point, youngman, for your life!"
"Fought me? yes, he did more than that--_whipped_ me; and I do not letmyself be whipped every day. If I ever found strength to rise again, I wasjust going to own up beat and ask his pardon."
From that moment, an expression of pain which had been perceptible onRobert Brand's face from the instant of his conversation with Dr. Pomeroy,changed in its character and lightened up, so to speak, if it did notentirely depart. "Not so total and abject a poltroon as I feared!" was histhought. He had not alighted from the carriage, his crippled limb makingthat step difficult; but leaning over the side of it, he saw something onthe grass reminding him of what Kitty had alleged.
"There is blood upon the grass--whose is it?--my son's?" he asked.
"Mine, every drop of it--out of my nose. See, here is the rest of it,"answered Dick Compton, drawing from his pocket the bloody handkerchief withwhich he had tried to improve the appearance of his countenance, whileriding away after the doctor.
"What do you make of all this, Doctor?" at length asked Robert Brand.
"It puzzles me, of course," said the medical man. "It is strange how Mr.Brand should have fallen for dead, if he was not. And yet it is not likelythat any one would have taken up the body and carried it away, if he was.It would seem most probable that--"
"That he is still alive?"
"That his apparent death was only the result of a fit of some character,and that, coming to after Mr. Compton left, and missing his horse, he hasgone homeward, or in some other direction, on foot."
"So I should think," answered the father. "Stephen, drive me home again. Ifyou should hear any thing further, Doctor--"
"I will do myself the honor of letting you know immediately," answered theyoung physician, with a bow and a quiet consciousness that, from stress ofcircumstances, the man whom he yet hoped to call father-in-law, had at lastgiven him a tacit invitation to come to his house on _his_ business.
"And what shall I do with the horse?" asked Compton.
"As it seems that you have been the means of forcing the rider off itsback, if you have not killed him, I think you can do no less than to ridehim home to Mr. Brand's stables," said the doctor.
"I am sorry that I brought you here for nothing, Doctor. You don't thinkthat I need to go and give myself up, eh?"
"I am very _glad_ that you brought me here for nothing, as it appears,instead of for something," answered the doctor. "No, I do not think thatyou will have occasion to give any thing up, except your bad temper andyour propensity for fighting peaceable men along public roads. I wish you avery good day, Mr. Brand!" and stepping into his sulky, he drove away downthe road to attend to some one of his limited number of patients; while thecarriage containing Robert Brand whirled rapidly home again, followed at alittle distance by Dick Compton on Carlton Brand's horse, the fear of beingproved a murderer somewhat lifted from his mind; his military pantshaunting him a little less than they had done during the former ride; andthe bundle which had at one time threatened to prove so damning an evidenceagainst him, hugged up under his left arm.