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 Elspeth Graeme to the Brand family, that they were Scots by descent as she was by both blood and birth. Robert Brand himself stood in the fourth remove from Gaelic nativity, without the spirit of his race being extinct or even modified. When Archibald Alexander, father of that William Alexander who claimed to be Earl of Stirling in the peerage of Scotland while he was gallantly fighting as a Major-General in the patriot army of the Revolution, came to America in 1740, he was accompanied by a man who claimed to hold quite as good blood as himself, though he served in little less than a menial capacity to the heir of the attainted house of Stirling. This was Malcolm Brand, of Perthshire, a member of the Scottish and elder branch of the Brands of Hertfordshire in England, who at a later day carried the two crossed swords which they had borne on their shields since the Crusades, to augment the threatening bulls, wolves and leopards of the Dacres, in the possession of that barony. It was in a victorious hand-to-hand fight with a gigantic Saracen on the field of Askalon, that Gawin de Brande, laird of Westenro in Lothian, fighting close beside King Richard, won that proud quartering of arms; and it is to be believed that no descendant of his blood, either in 1740 or in 1863, had quite forgotten that exploit or the fact that the very name of the family was only another antique appellation for the sword.
Malcolm Brand, the emigrant, was the father of a son Robert, born in New Jersey, as Archibald Alexander was the sire of William, who so proudly outdid the exploits of his elder blood, fighting under the leadership of Washington. The two young men, resident nearly together among the New Jersey hills, entered the army at the same time, and while the one rose to the dignity of a Major-General, the other shared in his combats at Long Island, Germantown and Monmouth, always fighting gallantly, but never rising beyond the grade of a first-lieutenant, and dying at last a prisoner on one of the pest-ships of the Wallabout. His son William, named after Lord Stirling and born in 1768, had of course passed as a boy through the trying period of the great contest, known that identification with the patriot cause inevitable from anxiety for a father engaged in it and grief over his lingering death by disease and privation for its sake; and it could not be otherwise than that the ears of his son, Robert (the man of 1863), should have been filled with relations calculated at once to keep alive the pride of his blood and to identify him with the glory and honor of the land in which his lot had been cast.
Then had come another influence, not less potent—the second breaking-out of hostilities against England, in the War of 1812. The blood of the Brands was 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 his armorial bearings and fought with Scott at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane, receiving so terrible an injury in the leg, at the close of the latter battle, that he was to be a tortured cripple from that day forward, but glorying even in the disablement and the suffering, because his injury had not been met in some trivial accident of peaceful life, but sustained where brave 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 practising lawyer in his native State, became identified with that most romantic and most 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 is handed down from father to son, or carried forward in such desultory records as these—The Pensioners of the Revolution. At that time, not less on account of his spotless reputation than the crippling wound received in the service, he was appointed Pension Agent for the section in which he resided, and duly commissioned twice a year to receive from the War Department and pay over to the old men the somewhat scant and very tardy pay with which the land of Washington at last smoothed the passage to the grave of those who had been his companions.
It was Robert Brand's privilege, then, to meet those men in the familiar intercourse of business—to listen to their tales, so often slighted by those wiser or less reverent, of foughten field and toilsome march, of cheerless camp and suffering in the wilderness, when this giant nation was a wilful child unjustly scourged by a tyrant mother—to find in each some reminder of his patriot grandfather, and some suggestion of what that grandfather would have been had the fortune of war spared him to go down into old age and senility.
Twice a year, as the pension day came round, one by one they gathered in the little room where the scanty pension was to be doled—each with the measured beat of his stick sounding upon the floor as he entered, regularly as when his foot had beaten time in the olden days, under the iron rain of Princeton, or on the suffering march to Valley Forge. One by one they gathered to what was their great semi-annual holiday, with the kindly greetings of garrulous and failing age—with the gentle complaint, so patiently uttered, over limbs that seemed to be bowing with the weight of time, and with the pardonable boast that it was not so when the speaker had been young, in such a winter on the Northern Lines, or with such an officer at Yorktown or Saratoga. When the winters—said they—were colder than they are now, when the men were hardier, and when the women (they had all long before gone to rest, in the family graveyard or the little plat beside the church,) were fairer far than their daughters ever grew!
Harmless deception of age!—pleasant coloring that distance gives in time as well as in the material world, so that the forms we once loved may be even more beautiful in thought than they were in reality; the grassy lawns upon which we played in childhood, greener far in memory than they ever were beneath the sun of June; and even those hours once filled with anxiety and vexation, so beguiled out of their uncomely features, that they have no power to harm us in after-thought, and almost seem to have been freighted with unalloyed happiness! There may have been a thunder-cloud rising in the heavens, that afternoon when we went boating with Harry and Tom and Mary and Susan and Alice, all the way down from Lovers' Bend to the Isle of Kisses, with music, and laughter and loving words that were sweeter far than song; and the thunder-cloud may have thickened and gathered, so that the young lovers were drenched and very dismal-looking, long before their return at evening; but be sure that forty years after, when the day is remembered, only the sunshine, the smiling faces and the flashing water is seen, and if the thunder-storm has a place in memory at all, it comes back more as a pleasure than a disappointment. Mary may have had a cloud upon her brow, that evening at the garden-gate, from the absence of a ribbon lightly promised, or the presence of a recollection how some one flirted with Julia on the evening before; and there may even have been a tiff verging far towards a lover's quarrel, before the reconciliation and the parting under the moon; but when the hair has grown gray, and Mary is with the millions sleeping in the breast of our common mother, only the moonlight, that dear last kiss, and the rapture of happy love are remembered, and that checkered hour is looked back upon as one of unmixed enjoyment. Time is the flatterer of memory, as well as the consoler of grief, and perhaps has no holier office. So it was well that the old men's mental eyes were dim when their physical vision was failing; and when we grow old as they, if the scythe of the destroyer cut us not away long before, may the far-away past be gilded for us as it was for them, by the rosy hue of fading remembrance, until all the asperities, the hard realities, the sharp and salient edges and angles of life, are smoothed and worn away forever!
Sitting side by side, they talked—those bent and worn and gray old men—of scenes long matters of honored history, glorying (ah! honest and natural glory!) in having stood guard at the tent of Wayne, or shared the coarse fare of Sumter in the Southern woods, but most of all if happily the eye of Washington had chanced to beam upon them, and his lips (those lips that seldom broadly smiled) approved or thanked their honest service. Few men, even of those who fought beside him, seemed ever to have known a smile from the Father of his Country; but for those few there always beamed a light of glorious memory to which the all-repaying word and the intoxicating smile of the Great Corsican would have been empty and valueless.
It was easy, twenty or thirty years afterwards, to remember the fire that blazed in the dim eyes of old Job Marston, as he told how Washington commended him for his good conduct on the afternoon of the dreadful day of Long Island, when Sullivan's legion broke and fled like frightened sheep,—and how the veteran straightened himself upon his staff as if the head which had once borne the praise of the Joshua of American Liberty should scarcely bend even to time. Or the quivering of the hand of Walter Thorne, one of the men who bore, through every trial and danger, the pledge of faith of the Monmouth League—quivering yet with the anger which had brooded for more than fifty years,—as he pictured so plainly the burning of his father's house by the Refugees, the acres of broad land laid waste by them, the cattle driven towards the royal lines from his own homestead, the arming of his friends, the chase, the recapture, and the ghastly figure of the Refugee captain as they hung him on a spreading limb that spanned the road, a sacrifice not only for the home in ashes but to the manes of Captain Huddy, scarcely yet taken down from his oak-tree gallows on the heights of Navesink. Or the quietly felicitous chuckle with which Stephen Holmes, who had been one of "Captain Huyler's men" in the operations of that patriot marine freebooter around the shores of the lower bay of New York, detailed the success of a night attack in boats pretending to carry live-stock and oysters for sale, by which one vessel of the British fleet lying in the bay was captured, much welcome spoil fell into their hands for the use of needy families at home, and all the remaining vessels of the squadron rode uncomfortably in the bay for a long time after. Or the half playful and half indignant raising of the cane of Robert Grey, when told by his old companions, for the five-hundredth time beyond a doubt, that he was suspected of a share in Arnold's treason, for not stopping the disguised Andre as he passed his sentinel post below West Point, before he fell into the hands of the three very common and insignificant men made immortal by one single act—Williams, Paulding and Van Wert. There would have been no pretence in the motion, spite of his eighty years and faltering limbs, had the speaker hazarded more than a jest against the faithfulness of the old man's service in the "dark day." But easiest of all was it to remember the story of Thomas West, wounded, and crippled from that day forth, in assisting to bear the wounded Lafayette from the field of Brandywine, and named a subaltern officer at the close of that memorable action. His was the seat of honor; and his was something more, even, than that measure of respect demanded by all and so cheerfully paid to white hairs and honorable scars.
Seldom was there a voice to speak one word of disrespect or undervaluation in the old men's company; and though the privilege of garrulous and failing age was often taken, and though the story once full of life and interest grew 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 men who bore the last personal recollections of the seven-years war. Only once, within the experience of Robert Brand as a Pension Agent, was such disrespect shown; and then the punishment was so signal that there were no fears of the impropriety being repeated. Mart Tunison, a wealthy young landowner, rudely jostled old Job Marston on one occasion, and when called to account for the offence, snapped his fingers at the veteran as a "cursed old humbug, always in the way and always telling stories of battles he had never 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 his faded eye. "I am rich, and what is that to you, grand-daddy?" was the answer, 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 of the "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's face! You are living on the proceeds of the money that your Tory grandfather, old Tom Tunison, made by stealing cattle, when he was one of the Refugee Cow-Boys, and driving them over the lines to sell to the British, 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 is doubtful,—would probably have given the best field of all his broad lands to prevent that revelation of the shame of his family, which afterwards followed him like a thing of ill-omen, to the very grave!
There was at that time in the office of Robert Brand, a stripling youngster who promised very little good to the world and has probably as yet disappointed no one—who thought more of play than of work, of music than of mortgages, of Burns than Blackstone, and of a rosy-cheeked girl who came into the office on some little errand to the "'Squire" than of the most proud and stately of his male clients. Among his vices, he had a fancy for jingling verse; and one day when the semi-annual visit of the pensioners had just terminated and he had listened afresh to the same old tales of glory told over again in the same faltering accents that he had heard so many times before, his one virtue of reverence for the aged and the venerable rose into an idle rhyme, which may have a fit place in this connection, and which he called