A Man of Honor

by George Cary Eggleston

The men who make up mails and handle great bags full of letters every day of their lives grow accustomed to the business, I suppose, and learn after awhile to regard the bags and their contents merely as so many pounds of "mail matter." Otherwise they would soon become unfit for their duties. If they could weigh those bags with other than material scales—if they could know how many human hopes and fears; how much of human purpose and human despair; how many joys and how much of wretchedness those bags contain; if they could hear the moans that utter themselves inside the canvas; if they could know the varying purposes with which all those letters have been written, and the various effects they are destined to produce; if our mail carriers could know and feel all these things, or the half of them, we should shortly have no mail carriers at all. But fortunately there are prosaic souls enough in the world to make all necessary mail agents and postmasters, and undertakers and grave-diggers out of.

In the small mail bag thrown off at the Court House one December morning, there was one little package of New York letters—three letters in all, but on those three letters hung the happiness of several human lives. Of one of them we shall learn nothing for the present. The other two, from Robert Pagebrook to his uncle and Miss Barksdale, we have already been permitted to read. When these were received at Shirley, Miss Sudie took hers to her own room and read it there, after which she sat down and answered it. Col. Barksdale read his with no surprise, as he had not been able to imagine any possible explanation of Robert's conduct; and now that that gentleman frankly confessed that there was none, he accepted the confession as a bit of evidence in the case, for which he had waited merely as a matter of form. It was his duty now to talk again with his niece, but he was very tender always in his dealings with her, and felt an especial tenderness now that she must be suffering sorely. He quietly inquired where she was, and learning that she was in her own room, he refrained from summoning her himself, and gave her maid particular instructions to allow no one else to intrude upon her privacy upon any pretense whatsoever.

"Lucy," he said, to the colored woman, "your Miss Sudie wishes to be alone for awhile. Sit down in the passage near her door, but don't knock, and don't allow any one else to knock. When she wishes to see any one she will open the door herself, and until then I do not want her disturbed."

Then going into the dining-room, where Dick was polishing the mahogany with a large piece of cork, he said:

"Dick, go out to the office and ask your Mas' Billy if he will be good enough to come to me in the library. I want to talk with him."

When Billy came in his father showed him Robert's letter.

"The thing looks very ugly," said the younger gentleman.

"Very ugly, indeed," said his father; "but the confounded rascal holds up his head under it all, and acts as honorably in Sudie's case as if he had never acted otherwise than as a gentleman should. He is a puzzle to me. But, of course, this must end the matter. We can have nothing whatever to do with him hereafter."

"But how is it, father, that they have managed to imprison him?"

"I presume they have secured an order of arrest under that New York statute which seems to have been devised as a means of securing to creditors all the advantages of imprisonment for debt without shocking the better sense of the community, which is clearly against such imprisonment. The majority of people rarely ever pay any attention to the fact so long as they are spared the name of odious things. No debtors' prison would be allowed to stand in the United States, of course, but the common jails answer all purposes when a way for getting debtors locked up in them has been devised."