At last Miss Tremaine returned. Her mother had been dangerously ill. It was an hour after midnight. Sincerely astounded at finding it so late, Kenrick took his leave. Heart and brain were full. “Thou art the wine whose drunkenness is all I can desire, O love!”
And how was it with Clara? Alas, the contrariety of the affections! Clara simply thought Kenrick a very agreeable young man: handsome, but not so handsome as Onslow; clever, but not so clever as Vance!
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A LETTER OF BUSINESS.
“This war’s duration can be more surely calculated from the moral progress of the North than from the result of campaigns in the field. Were the whole North to-day as one man on the moral issues underlying the struggle, the Rebellion were this day crushed. God bids us, I think, be just and let the oppressed go free. Let us do his bidding, and the plagues cease.”—Letter from a native of Richmond, Va.
The following letter belongs chronologically to this stage in our history:—
From F. Macon Semmes, New York, to T. J Semmes, New Orleans.
“Dear Brother: I have called, as you requested, on Mr. Charlton in regard to his real estate in New Orleans. Let me give you some account of this man. He is taxed for upwards of a million. He inherited a good part of this sum from his wife, and she inherited it from a nephew, the late Mr. Berwick, who inherited it from his infant daughter, and this last from her mother. Mother, child, and father—the whole Berwick family—were killed by a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi some fifteen or sixteen years ago.
“In the lawsuit which grew out of the conflicting claims of the relatives of the mother on the one side, and of the father on the other, it was made to appear that the mother must have been killed instantaneously, either by the inhalation of steam from the explosion, or by a blow on the head from a splinter; either cause being sufficient to produce immediate death. It was then proved that the child, having been seen with her nurse alive and struggling in the water, must have lived after the mother,—thus inheriting the mother’s property. But it was further proved that the child was drowned, and that the father survived the child a few hours; and thus the father’s heir became entitled to an estate amounting to upwards of a million of dollars, all of which was thus diverted from the Aylesford family (to whom the property ought to have gone), and bestowed on a man alien in blood and in every other respect to all the parties fairly interested.
“This fortunate man was Charlton. The scandal goes, that even the wife from whom he derived the estate (and who died before he got it) had received from him such treatment as to alienate her wholly. The nearest relative of Mrs. Berwick, née Aylesford, is a Mrs. Pompilard, now living with an aged husband and with dependent step-children and grandchildren, in a state of great impoverishment. To this aunt the large property derived from her brother, Mr. Aylesford, ought to have gone. But the law gave it to a stranger, this Charlton. I mention these facts, because you ask me to inform you what manner of man he is.
“Let one little anecdote illustrate. Mr. Albert Pompilard, now some eighty years old, has been in his day a great operator in Wall Street. He has made half a dozen large fortunes and lost them. Five years ago, by a series of bold and fortunate speculations, he placed himself once more on the top round of the financial ladder. He paid off all his debts with interest, pensioned off a widowed daughter, lifted up from the gutter several old, broken-down friends, and advanced a handsome sum to his literary son-in-law, Mr. Cecil Purling, who had found, as he thought, a short cut to fortune. Pompilard also bought a stylish place on the Hudson; and people supposed he would be content to keep aloof from the stormy fluctuations of Wall Street.