Bohemian Days: Three American Tales

by George Alfred Townsend

"As we started from Treaty Island, on that dark winter night," continued Andrew Zane, growing pale while he spoke, "Mr. Rainey said to me, 'Go in the bow. You are not to speak one word. I will face your father astern.' The oarsman, Donovan, had a hard pull. The first word I heard my father say was, 'That is none of your affair.' 'It is everybody's affair,' answered Mr. Rainey, 'because you make it so. Behave like a gentleman and a parent. The young people love each other.' 'I have the young lady's affections,' said my father. 'You are making her miserable,' said Mr. Rainey, 'and are deceiving yourself. She begins to hate you.' 'You are an insolent liar!' exclaimed my father. 'If you mix in this business I will throw you out of the firm.' 'That is no intimidation to me,' answered his partner. 'Prosperity can never attend the business of a cruel and unjust man. I shall be a brother to Andrew and a father to Agnes, since you would defraud them so. William Zane, I will see them married and supported!' With that my father threw himself in mere physical rage upon Mr. Rainey. They both arose, and Mr. Rainey shook himself loose and cried, 'You are outwitted, partner. I saw them married! They are man and wife!'

"With this my father's rage had no expression short of recklessness. He always carried arms, and was unconquerable. His ready hand had sought his weapon, I think, hardly consciously. His dismay and indignation for an instant destroyed his reason at Mr. Rainey's sudden statement of fact.

"My God! can I further particularize on such a scene? In a moment of time I saw before my eyes a homicide of insanity, a suicide of remorse; and to end all, the sailor in the boat, as if set crazy by these occurrences, leaped overboard also."

This narrative, given with rising energy of feeling by Andrew Zane, was heard with breathless attention. Andrew paused and glanced at his wife, whose face was bathed with the inner light of perfect relief. The greater babe of secrecy had ceased to travail with her.

"Mr. Magistrate," said the young husband, "as I am under my oath, I can only relate the acts which followed from the inference of my feelings. My first sense was that of astonishment too intense not to appear unreal and even amusing. It seemed to me that if I would laugh out loud all would come back, as delusions yield to scepticism and mockery. But it was too cold not to be real, the scene and persons were too familiar to be erroneous. I had to realize that I was in one of the great and terrible occasional convulsions of human nature. Do you know how it next affected me? With an instant's sense of sublimity! I said to myself, 'How dared I marry so much beauty and womanly majesty? Doing so, I have tempted the old gods and their fates and furies. This is poetical punishment for my temerity.' Still all the while I was laboring at the one scull left in the boat while my brain was fuming so, and listening for sounds on the water. I heard the sailor cry twice, and then his voice fainted away. I began to weep at the oar while I strained upon it, and called 'Help!' and implored God's intervention. At last I sat down in the boat, worn out and in despair, and let it drift down all the city's front, past lights and glooms and floating ice, and wished that I were dead. My father's kindness and all our disagreements rose to mind, and it seemed God's punishment that I had married where his intentions were. Yet to know the truth of this, I said a prayer upon my knees in the wet boat while my teeth chattered, and before the end of my prayer had come I was thinking of my wife's pure name, and how this would spot her as with stains of blood unless I could explain it.

"When I reached this stage of my exalted sensibilities I was nearly crazed. There had been no witness of our marriage except the minister, and he was already dead. We had been married at the country parsonage of an old retired minister beyond Oxford church, on the road from Frankford town, as we drove out one afternoon, and I prevailed with my conscientious wife to yield her scruples to our heart's necessity. 'Great God!' I thought aloud—for none could hear me there—'how dreadfully that secret marriage will compromise my wife! Who will believe us without a witness of what I must assert—a story so improbable that I would not believe it myself? I must say that I married my wife secretly from my father's house, confessing deceit for both of us, and with Agnes's religious professions, a sin in the church's estimation. If there could be an excuse for me, the strict people of Kensington will accord none to her. They will charge on her maturer mind the whole responsibility, paint her in the colors of ingratitude, and find in her greatest poverty the principal motive. Yes, they may be wicked enough to say she compassed the death of my father by my hands, to get his property.'

"I had proceeded thus far when the terror of our position became luminous like the coming fire on a prairie, which shows everything but a way of escape. 'Where is your father?' they would ask of me in Kensington. 'He is drowned.' 'How drowned?' 'He shot himself.' 'Why did he shoot himself?' 'Because I had married his ward.' 'But his partner is gone too.' 'He is murdered.' 'Why murdered?' 'Because he interceded for me.' 'Where is your witness?' 'He has disappeared.' I saw the wild improbability of this tale, and thought of past notorious quarrels with my father ended by my voluntary absence. There were but two points that seemed to stick in my nervous mind: 'It never would do to tell our marriage at that moment, and I must find that sailor, who might still be living.'"

"He found me, sure enough, begorra!" exclaimed Mike Donovan, giving the relief of laughter to that intense narrative.

"Cowardly as you may call my resolution, gentlemen, it was all the resolution I had left. To partake of the inheritance left me by both partners in our house I feared to do. 'Let us do the penance of suspicious separation,' I said to Agnes; 'as your husband I command you to let me go!' She yielded like a wife, and stood my hostage in Kensington for all those melancholy months. I had just learned the place for which the bark which passed us on that eventful night had cleared, when the two bullet-pierced bodies were discovered in the ice. That night I sailed for Wilmington, North Carolina. When I arrived there the bark was gone for the Mediterranean, but I heard of my sailor, wounded, in her hospital. I sailed from Charleston for Cuba, and from Cuba to Cadiz, and thence I embarked for Trieste. At Trieste I found the ship, but Donovan had sailed for Liverpool. From Liverpool I tracked him to the River Plate, and thence to Panama. You will ask how I lived all those months? Ask him."

He turned to Duff Salter.