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 has not been erected, and though it may never be, because a later and grander though scarce nobler struggle to preserve what was then first created, almost dwarfs the memory of the first contest and demands all the resources of wealth and art for its commemoration. The Pensioners of the Revolution are all gone, long ago, on the line of march to that great meeting where the last pension, whether of good or evil, shall be told out.
Almost every year, beneath the eye of the Pension Agent, one more withered leaf would drop from the bough where it had feebly fluttered, and sad comments be made by the survivors when they met, with: "Ah, well-a-day!—poor —— is gone!" and "Well, we are very old, and we must all follow him—some day!" with nervous shakings of the head and tremblings of the palsied hand, that told to all but themselves how soon the end must come. Thinner and thinner grew the group, reduced to six—to four—to three—to two! Oh, that sad, mournful, heart-breaking two!—enough gone to mark the coming extinction; enough still left to hold their melancholy converse! And then one day there came but one, who looked vacantly round on the empty space and seemed to remember that others than himself must once have been there, but to remember no more. The "Last Man" had not then been written, and Geoffry Dale was yet to spring from the imagination or the memory of the dramatist and supply poor Jesse Rural Blake with one of his best opportunities for throat-choking pathos; but in the last of the pensioners his history was sadly prefigured. One other lonely visit, and then the survivor was gone. All the group had dropped away. Their forms seemed to linger, long after the forms that cast them had mouldered into impalpable 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 an old man's cane upon the floor, and look to see if the comer was not one of the veterans of Yorktown or of Trenton, yet lingering far behind the time of his companions. But no—death had come to all, and as yet no resurrection. The last pittance had been paid them, and laid away for the last time by their careful fingers; and they, too, had been laid away by the hoarding miser of human forms, in quiet graves in those humble country church-yards dotting the bosom of that land which they had helped to free and to cover with human glory!
Perhaps they died in good time—before the dark hour came back again after a glorious morning and a cloudless noon. Perhaps it is well that the last of the Revolutionary veterans had passed beyond acute pain and heart-felt shame, before the attempt at national suicide came to embitter their last moments with the belief that after all they might have labored and suffered in vain. But their memory does not die. Mecca and Jerusalem are blended in the sacredness of that pilgrimage which the reverent heart travels back through the years to pay them; and if there is yet a leaven of self-sacrificing devotion in our national character sufficient to bear us on triumphantly to the great end, the yeast of true patriotism from which it 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 begin to show gray hairs. Following close upon the steps of the Last Man of the Revolution—the last of the men who could say that they saw and took part in that throe which gave birth to a nation,—tread all those who can even say that they ever saw them and took them by the hand. A few years, and the last of these, too, will be quiet and voiceless. The chain of personal recollection is growing thin,—it may break to-morrow; and "the rest is silence."
Such was the blood of Robert Brand, and such had been the influences and surroundings of his earlier life—himself a soldier when in possession of health and vigor, and the companion, friend and guardian of the noblest of all American soldiery when he became disabled and inactive. He loved his native land with an idolatry bordering on insanity; and during the long struggle between the interests of the sections, preceding the war, he had imbibed love of free institutions and hatred of slavery to a degree little less than fanatical. No regret had weighed so heavily upon him, when the note of conflict sounded in 1861, as the fact that his aged and crippled frame must prevent his striking one blow in a cause so holy; and if he held one pride more dearly than another, it was to be found in the remembrance that 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, but ready when the day of positive need should come, to maintain unsullied the honor of his race. What marvel, all these surroundings considered, that the knowledge of that son being an abject poltroon should nearly have unseated his reason, and that he should have uttered words which only the partial insanity of wounded pride and rankling shame could supply with any shadow of excuse?
At the close of the last chapter, and before this long explanatory episode intervened to break the progress of the narration, Elsie Brand, the agonized sister and daughter, was seen standing before her father, with hands clasped in agony and lips uttering agonized pleadings. But the very instant after, when the terrible severity of that parental curse had been fully rounded from the lips and that fatal evidence given that for the moment all natural affection had given way to impious rage and denunciation,—the young girl stood erect, her blue eyes still tearful but flashing anger of which they commonly seemed to be little capable, and her lips uttering words as determined as those of the madman, even if they were less furious and vindictive:
"You may strike me if you like, but I do not care for you, now—not one snap of my finger! You are not my father—you are nobody's father, but a bad, wicked, unfeeling old man, gray headed enough to know better, and yet cursing your own flesh and blood as if you wished to go to perdition yourself and carry everybody else along with you!"
The very audacity of this speech partially sobered the enraged man, and he only ejaculated in a lower but still angry tone:
"What!"
"What I say and what I mean!" the young girl went on, oblivious or heedless of any parental authority at the moment. "I do not love you—I hate and shudder at you! I would rather be my poor brother, a coward and disgraced as 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 the thunder again threatening, but Elsie Brand was proving, just then, that the gift 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 the expression of the old man's eyes and conscious that he might at any moment recover himself sufficiently to pour out upon her, for her unpardonable impudence, quite as bitter a denunciation as he had lately vented against her 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 going with 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 front door, through the parlor and into the room of the invalid, at that moment staggered Kitty Hood. The phrase descriptive of her movement is used advisedly and with good reason; for fright, exhaustion and the terrible heat of the June meridian had reduced the young school-mistress to a most pitiable condition. Her face was one red glow, her brow streamed with perspiration, and she was equally destitute of strength and out of breath.
This strange and unannounced interruption naturally broke the unpleasant chain of conversation between father and daughter; and the eyes of both, during her moment of enforced silence to recover breath, looked upon her with equal wonder and alarm.
"Oh, Mr. Brand!" and here the breath gave out again and she sank exhausted into 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; but your son, Mr. Brand."
"Well, what of him?" asked the old man, his tone sharp and angry and his brow frowning, confident that the coming information must have some connection with the disgraceful report of the morning—that Kitty Hood had only run herself out of breath in her anxiety to tell his family unwelcome news 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, little else than a groan; and the other from poor tortured Elsie, compounded between groan and shriek.
"Oh, yes, how can I tell it?" the young school-mistress went on, as fast as her broken breath would allow. "I found him lying dead, only a little while ago, 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 an instant after, and before the old man had found time to speak again, the curse came up in connection with the bereavement and she broke out, hysterically: "See what you have done, father! You wished poor Carlton dead, and now you have your cruel wish! Oh, my poor, poor brother!"
"Silence, girl!" spoke Robert Brand, sharply, with a not unnatural dislike to have the school-mistress made aware of what had so lately passed. The old man was terribly affected, but he managed to control himself and to speak 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 he asked 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 a time before done when asking equally solemn questions concerning the fate of 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," Elsie mustered strength to interrupt.
"Did you see his horse?—had he fallen from it—or—" and then the voice of the father, who but a few moments before had believed his love for his son crushed out forever, entirely broke down. Heaven only knew the agony of the question he was attempting to put; for the thought had taken possession of him that that son, overwhelmed by the knowledge that he would be pointed out and scoffed as a poltroon, had shown his second lack of courage by laying violent hands on his own life and rushing unbidden into the presence of his Maker!
"No," answered Kitty Hood, setting her teeth hard as she realized that the time had come when she must prove her own honesty at the possible sacrifice of the life of the man who had been her lover. "No, I did not see his horse. 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 dissimilar voices of father and daughter; the latter speaking in the terror of the thought, the former under the conviction that the dreadful truth was being revealed, and that, though the young girl did not suspect the fact, the crime would be found to have been self-murder.
"There was blood on his face and on the grass," poor Kitty went on, "and there was a bundle lying close beside him, that I had seen under the arm of—of—"
"Eh, what? Under whose arm?" asked the father, in a quick voice, as the relation 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 and bursting into tears. "But I must tell the truth, even if it hangs him and breaks my heart. He was at the school-house only a little while before; he was angry with Mr. Carlton, and threatened him; and I am afraid that he killed him."
"Oh, this is dreadful!" said Elsie.
"Dreadful indeed!" replied Robert Brand, whose own grief and horror were somewhat modified if not lessened by the thought in what a situation the honest young girl was placing herself and her lover. He reached back and pulled the bell-rope again, and again Elspeth Graeme made her appearance, a little surprised to find three persons in the room where she had before left but two, the third coming unannounced, and all three of the faces looking as if their owners had been summoned to execution.
"Tell Stephen to get up the large carriage, instantly, and have it round within five minutes," was the order to the old woman, delivered in a quick and 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. Robert Brand."
"I am not only thinking of it but going to do it; and the quicker you do my bidding, the better."
"Gang yer ways, then, for an uncanny, unmanageable auld ne'er-do-weel!" was the grumbling comment of the Scotch woman, as she prepared to obey the injunction. She strode half way through the parlor, then returned and fired another 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, and wha' will I ca' when ye come back a' ram-feezled and done over—answer me that, noo!"
Less than five minutes sufficed to bring the carriage to the door, with its team of well-groomed bays, and with much exertion (of which the stalwart Elspeth furnished no small proportion) the invalid was placed in it and so surrounded with cushions that he could ride with comparative ease. Elsie's tearful request to be allowed to accompany him in his quest of the body of her brother was sharply denied, with orders that both Kitty and herself should remain within the house until his return; and the carriage drove rapidly away towards the point designated by the school-mistress, while the housekeeper was learning the fearful tidings from the lips of the two girls, and uttering broken laments and raining tears down her coarse cheeks, over "her winsome bairn that had been sae sair wanchancie!"
Scarcely more time than had been consumed in getting ready the vehicle elapsed before the carriage, driven at rapid speed, dashed up to the spot that had been indicated by Kitty, the eyes of the father looking out in advance with an indescribable horror, to catch the first glimpse of the body 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 standing near the gate as they approached; but, strangely enough, they saw no dead body. One of these men, Robert Brand saw, was the young farmer, Richard Compton, who had been accused by Kitty of committing that terrible crime; the other, standing by the side of his professional sulky, was a man of twenty-five, of medium height, very carefully dressed, fair faced, dark haired and dark eyed, with features well rounded and an inexpressibly sweet smile about the handsome mouth, which might have made an impression, under proper circumstances, upon other hearts than the susceptible one of Elsie Brand. Dr. James Holton, as has before been said, was a young physician, in very 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 eligible as 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 was sufficiently attentive and studious in his profession, to have run a closer race with the local professional autocrat, Dr. Pomeroy, than he had yet been able to do, but for the skilfully managed sneers and quiet undervaluations by which the elder had kept him from winning public confidence. For more than two years he had been a frequent visitor at Robert Brand's, received with undisguised pleasure by Elsie and treated with great consideration by her brother, but meeting from the respected head of the family that peculiar treatment which can no more be construed into cordiality than insult, and which says, quite as plainly as words could speak, "You are a respectable young man enough, and may be received with politeness as a visitor; but you do not amount to enough in the world, 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 medical adviser; and it was her knowledge of the antagonism between the two and of the estimation in which each was held, that had induced the housekeeper to make her parting suggestion of the effect which must follow his order to set the dog on Pomeroy if he ever again attempted to approach the house. No one, meanwhile, could better appreciate his own position than Dr. James Holton; and while well aware that he loved Elsie Brand dearly, and firmly believing that she held towards him an unwavering affection, he was content to wait until his fortunes should so improve as to make him a more eligible match for her, or until in some other providential manner the obstacles to their union might be removed.
Such was the gentleman who approached Robert Brand's carriage door with a bow, the moment the coachman had reined up his horses, and while that gentleman was looking around with fearful anxiety for an object which his eyes 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, the school-mistress, saw the body as she passed, and came to inform me."
"Kitty Hood!" gasped Richard Compton, turning from the fence against which he had been leaning, and exhibiting a face nearly as white as that traditionally 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, had an 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 devil was in me, I suppose, and I insulted Carlton Brand like a fool, and dared him 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 place at the same time—I do not know. All that I do know is, that when I got my senses again, he lay stiff as a poker there on the grass. I thought him dead 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—the Lord knows which!—was gone."
"My son got off his horse to fight you, you say?" asked Robert Brand, in such 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, young man, for your life!"
"Fought me? yes, he did more than that—whipped me; and I do not let myself be whipped every day. If I ever found strength to rise again, I was just going to own up beat and ask his pardon."
From that moment, an expression of pain which had been perceptible on Robert 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 not entirely depart. "Not so total and abject a poltroon as I feared!" was his thought. He had not alighted from the carriage, his crippled limb making that step difficult; but leaning over the side of it, he saw something on the 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 with which he had tried to improve the appearance of his countenance, while riding 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 likely that 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 has gone homeward, or in some other direction, on foot."
"So I should think," answered the father. "Stephen, drive me home again. If you should hear any thing further, Doctor—"
"I will do myself the honor of letting you know immediately," answered the young physician, with a bow and a quiet consciousness that, from stress of circumstances, the man whom he yet hoped to call father-in-law, had at last given 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 its back, if you have not killed him, I think you can do no less than to ride him home to Mr. Brand's stables," said the doctor.
"I am sorry that I brought you here for nothing, Doctor. You don't think that 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 that you will have occasion to give any thing up, except your bad temper and your propensity for fighting peaceable men along public roads. I wish you a very good day, Mr. Brand!" and stepping into his sulky, he drove away down the road to attend to some one of his limited number of patients; while the carriage containing Robert Brand whirled rapidly home again, followed at a little distance by Dick Compton on Carlton Brand's horse, the fear of being proved a murderer somewhat lifted from his mind; his military pants haunting him a little less than they had done during the former ride; and the bundle which had at one time threatened to prove so damning an evidence against him, hugged up under his left arm.