That Affair at Elizabeth

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

"Her children?" I repeated. The story interested me so intensely that I wanted every detail.

"There were two, a girl of seventeen or eighteen, named Ruth; and Boyd, who was about nineteen, and a junior at Princeton. I had heard something of his college escapades while I was at the seminary, but the first time I saw him was when he came home for the holidays. He was a handsome boy, dark, with a face that showed his breeding; but he was the wildest, most untamable I ever knew. When he came walking into church with his mother, it used to amuse me to see how Mr. Jarvis would glare at him; he considered him a firebrand of hell, and didn't scruple to say so. And young Endicott would stare back—at Jarvis, as I thought, but I saw my mistake afterwards.

"There was more or less trouble of a personal kind between the two. Endicott's dog killed some of the Jarvis chickens, and Jarvis shot the dog. Endicott rode over the Jarvis land, and Jarvis swore out a warrant against him for trespass—mere persecution, the villagers thought it,—and there were other differences of a similar nature, which were ended only when the boy went back to school.

"Of course, Mr. Lester, I don't know all the steps in the affair; but on Christmas Eve, just a year later, there came a great knocking at my door, and when I opened it, there on the step stood Jarvis, with such a face as I had never seen on a man before. He stamped in and flung a sheet of paper down on the table.

"'Read that!' he said, in a stifled voice. 'Read that, man! Oh, that I should have bred a harlot!'

"I was too astonished to reply, but I picked up the paper and read it. It was a note from his daughter—I forget the exact words—but she told him that she had secretly married Boyd Endicott, knowing that she could never win his consent, and prayed for his forgiveness. They were going far away, she said; she would not see him again for a long time, and hoped he would think kindly of her. It was a touching note, Mr. Lester."

The good man's voice choked and he paused to regain control of it. As for me, I thought of that other note I had read a few hours since.

"He was like a man crazed," continued Dr. Schuyler, at last. "He wouldn't listen to reason; he demanded only that I accompany him, while he sought his daughter out and made sure that she and young Endicott were really married. He swore that he would follow them to the ends of the earth that he might see them wedded with his own eyes. A heavy storm was raging, but I could not deny him; he had his buggy at the door, and we drove away to the Fanwood station. There the agent told us that Miss Jarvis had taken the afternoon train for New York. There was no other train for an hour, so we waited. Jarvis tramped up and down the station like a wild thing. And then, just before the train was due, there came a telegram for him. It was from his sister and stated that Mary had reached her home unattended and was very ill.

"That settled the matter, so far as I was concerned. I drove back home again and Jarvis went on to New York. Unfortunately, in the first rage of his discovery of his daughter's flight, he had given the servants some hint of the affair, and it leaked out, but was gradually forgotten. Mary Jarvis, after a long illness, went with her father for a visit to Scotland, and did not return to her home at Scotch Plains for nearly three years. She was greatly changed—older and with an air of sadness which never quite left her.

"Her father was changed, too. He had left his daughter at his old home in Scotland and hurried back—why I didn't guess till afterwards. He became more crabbed and irritable than ever; he seemed to be withering away, and his face grew to haunt me, it was so harried and anxious. I suspected that he had become involved in business troubles of some sort, for the country was on the verge of a panic, and once I tried to approach the subject to offer him any help I could, but he stopped me with such ferocity that I never tried again. Then, suddenly, came the news that Endicott had been caught with Fisk in the ruin of Black Friday; but while Fisk saved himself by repudiating his obligations, Endicott had been bound in such a way that he could not repudiate—and the man who had bound him was Hiram Jarvis."