Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862

by Henry Morford

But these reflections over, which have sprung from the fruit glistening on the trees in John Crawford's garden, the course of this narration reverts to two who occupied the back piazza of the mansion at that hour of Sunday noon. The piazza was a broad one, old-fashioned like the house, with pillars of locust, planed and cornered instead of being turned or fluted in the more modern fashion. Both the ends and the side for a considerable distance towards the centre, were enclosed by a low railing in pale; and the western end had lattice-work extending to the tops of the pillars, with the leaves and tendrils of a large grape-vine that had been planted many years before at the corner, running over, twisting and interlacing in the lattice, and making a pleasant flickering shade of the summer sunshine on the floor of the piazza. A few birds, not yet thoroughly exhausted by the noonday heat, were chirping in the thick branches of the fruit-trees near, and the drowsy hum and chirp of insect life made such a sleepy undertone as could not fail to bring rest and quiet to any mind not preternaturally active. A more charming place could not have been devised, for a half-dreamy and lazy student of either sex to sit down in an easy chair with a pleasant book, read and muse until the flickering of the sunshine and the shadows on the floor began to be blended with the type of the page, and then fall away to the lightest and happiest of slumbers.

There were two figures on the western end of the piazza, under the shade of the grape-vine. The first was that of an old man, sitting in a high-backed easy-chair, his feet upon a carpet-covered ottoman, leaning back, and if not in physical slumber, at least in that inertia of the mind which denotes failing physical faculties and marks a slumber more complete than that of shut eyes and stertorous breathing. Apparently he was very old, for his hair was thin and nearly white, as it showed from beneath the colored silk handkerchief thrown loosely over the back of his head; his skin had that shrivelled and wrinkled appearance, denoting that the life-fluids had been exhausted beneath it; his eyes, when opened, had that white opacity more melancholy than apparent blindness, because it shows a sight which after all takes in and recognizes nothing; and his thin lips had that constant tremulous motion which indicates a continual desire to speak, with scarcely the power of doing so and with little more than the remnants of a mind left to dictate what shall be uttered. John Crawford was, in short, a miserable human wreck, all its pride, beauty and power shorn and swept away, and drifting helplessly on to that lee-shore which is called death.

There was one peculiar feature of his situation which has not yet been named, and yet it was the most noticeable of all connected with him. From head to foot, sleeping or waking, at all times and under all circumstances, his nervous system was shaking and shivering, keeping the head in that continual quiver which is so melancholy to behold because it suggests involuntary labor that must exhaust and wear out the system, and making the weak hand so ungovernable that even the cup of tea put to his mouth required to be held and guided by others to prevent the contents being spilled and the vessel falling to the floor. Nothing could be more pitiable, when watched for a considerable time and when the impression forced itself upon the observer that at no single moment would that tremor ever grow still until the spoiler had completed his work, and the limbs should stiffen and straighten in the last chill of mortality.

And yet John Crawford was really by no means the very old man indicated by his white hairs, his dimmed eyes and his palsied shiverings. He was very little past sixty, and at an age when under ordinary circumstances several years of pleasant life might have been calculated upon. Nor was he the victim of constitutional disease, which had been fought and combatted until it had at last triumphed and brought down the torn banner of manhood trailing in the dust. And still less had a life of early indulgence and evil courses laid the mine for this after-destruction. He was not old to senility; he belonged to a family that had been noted for their long life, continued vigor and freedom from hereditary disease; and he had carefully avoided those errors in drink, food and personal indulgence which open the doors of life's citadel to the invader from beyond the dark valley. What, then, was the fatal secret? John Crawford was a suicide, and he had chosen a peculiarly American mode of self-immolation. Or perhaps it may with more propriety be said that he was a Faust in ordinary life, and that he had called upon a national demon to be his aid and his foe. He had worked himself to death—a phrase by many supposed to be hollow and unmeaning, but one too sadly illustrated every day in our modern life.

Born wealthy, he seemed to have imbibed with his earliest breath the impression that he was comparatively poor, and that only the most laborious drudgery of mind and body, to which the toil of the slave in the cotton-field is little more than play, could keep him from becoming still poorer. He had been a miser at once of his pennies and his hours, when a boy; and as he had grown older he had become a still worse miser in every opportunity for gain, and a reckless spendthrift of his own comfort and energy. No laborer on his farm had worked so many hours or so laboriously, the impression having seemed all the while to abide with him that if he did not labor he would have only eye-service, and nothing would be left him. When others had slept, and he had been debarred from laboring with his hands, he had still toiled with his brain, turning restlessly on his bed when he should have slept, and planning to make his fertile acres still more productive or to add to them others that lay in tempting proximity. When hours of relaxation had been demanded by the calls of friendship, and even by the inexorable demands of his own system, he had shut his ears and refused, as if putting behind his back some tempter of the soul. Friends had said to him: "John, you are killing yourself!" or "John, you are working too hard and too steadily! Some day you will pay for all this." And one day a blunt-spoken rustic neighbor, observing him at his toil early and late, had said: "John Crawford, you are a fool! You do too much work! You have a fine constitution, and think that you can take liberties with it; but some day it will pay you, mark my words! You will find yourself, one fine morning, doubled up like an old horse that has been over-driven; and that will be the end of you! But go on, if you like it!"

John Crawford had "gone on." He had married very late in life, principally on account of his belief that no man should marry until he had done his life-work and placed himself beyond anxiety on the score of property. When the day of his marriage came, after an engagement of nearly ten years, people had long been saying that the woman of his choice, his "Mary," had already worried away the best part of her life in anxiety for him and in fears for the final prevention of their union. Then, when the marriage was finally consummated and those who loved him best hoped that he would relax in his life-wearing toil, he had merely commenced to work the harder, because a married man needed to be better circumstanced than a single one! And when, five or six years after his marriage, and after giving birth to his one daughter and only child, Mary, his wife died, he had gone to work still harder, it seemed, as the only means of forgetting his bereavement! Rain or shine—early and late—year after year, he had labored on, enriching his lands and increasing his outbuildings, adding new acres and putting a few more thousands to those already out at interest on good bond-and-mortgage.

One day—some two years before the date of this story—the crash had come. The "old horse" had "doubled up." John Crawford had not come down to breakfast at his usual time, and those who went up to look after him had first discovered what ruin could do in a single night. The hale man of the night before had become a partial paralytic, helpless from that day forward—never again to lift hand in any employment, and scarcely permitted brain enough to realize all that he had won and all that he had lost. Gradually, afterwards, his mind had cleared and his speech returned, though feebly; but during all the two years his nervous prostration had been increasing and his bodily strength declining, until for weeks before that Sunday of July the physicians had pronounced him gradually dying and expected him to drop away at any moment.

Such was half the picture presented at the end of the piazza, the other half being made up of Colonel Egbert Crawford, his military coat changed to a blouse of brown linen and his boots replaced by a pair of embroidered slippers, but in all other regards quite as we have before seen him, and altogether the legitimate commander of the Two Hundredth Volunteers. During all his late visits to the farm, and especially since the defection and ostracism of Richard, he had made his "strong point" in paying great attention to the infirm old gentleman; and as personal attention is always pleasant and flattering, and more particularly so to the old, crippled, tedious and tiresome, he had succeeded in winning a place in the old man's regard, by this course, which he might have failed to secure by any other means.

On this particular morning he was rather well pleased than otherwise to see Mary throw on her flat and run out to make a call on some one of the neighbors, as this gave him an opportunity, on this his last day of probation, of making himself very devoted to his prospective father-in-law, without any serious drain upon his own personal comfort and energy. To wait upon the old man, after he had been got up and dressed for the morning and assisted out to the cool piazza, as in this instance—consisted of very little more than answering the few words which the invalid might happen to address him (and they were likely to be very few),—brushing away a troublesome fly when the old man sunk into a doze and the pest came too near his nose,—moving him a little if the sun happened to become troublesome through the vines,—or picking up and restoring a dropped handkerchief. The Colonel was rather well pleased to have something to employ him in this manner on this particular morning, especially when he could combine the employment with a book and a lounge with his feet upon the piazza-railing; for the house was a little ticklish for indiscriminate roaming about, owing to the arrangements which he knew to be in progress. The dare-devil Major Lally, of the French revolutionary time, is said to have laid his head upon the block with many doubts as to the grace of his position, and with an apology to the executioner if he should have happened to transgress any of the rules of mortuary good-breeding,—on the ground that "he never had had his head cut off before;" and Colonel Egbert Crawford, never having been married before, may be excused if he had some sort of indefinite impression that all the rooms in the house were full of awful preparations, liable to be run against at any moment, and altogether fatal to matrimonial prospects if accidentally disturbed. So the piazza and the old man furnished him with a means of killing time that was "devilish dull," and at the same time with a certainty of being kept in a place where he could not possibly "run foul of anything" or do any harm.

The old man had scarcely spoken for half an hour. He had been lulled by the drowsy sounds of the summer noon, and by the growing listlessness of his own nature, into a few moments of doze, in which the Colonel, closing his eyes to the pages of his book, seemed on the point of joining him. Suddenly a rooster, that had strolled around from the barnyard and flown up to a cool location on the top of the garden fence, and under the shade of one of the cherry-trees (at which elevation no doubt his numerous harem in the yard regarded him with the same reverent respect paid to the Prophet Brigham, when at a distance, by his fifty-six wives and a fraction)—suddenly this rooster, forgetting the proprieties of the place and the hour, lazily flapped his big wings and emitted a crow of such magnificent dimensions as might have startled the whole neighborhood. Colonel Egbert Crawford started and opened his eyes: the old man straightened up his shaking head and did likewise. The sound was like an icy sword-blade thrust into a slumbering and tepid fountain—startling all the water spirits from repose and propriety,—or like Christmas suddenly obtruded, keen and pure, into the sluggish rest of midsummer. Of what the old man mused as his waking thoughts recognized the sound, can never be known—possibly of the wealth which he had garnered and of the broad lands over which that sound went ringing—all his own, but his own in what miserable mockery! Of what Colonel Egbert Crawford thought when the sound smote his ears, is much more certain. The cock-crow and betrayal! He had been brought up in the country, and many a time, in his younger and better days, when intercourse with the world had not yet developed the evil germ in his character, he had read and pondered over the mysterious connection between the cock, Shakspeare's "bird of dawning," and the scenes which preceded the Crucifixion. Remembering that the cock had seemed to appear and speak as the accuser of Peter, he had insensibly come to connect those events with the blacker guilt of Iscariot, and to look upon the bird as the watcher and detecter. In olden days this had not troubled him: perhaps it would not have done so, only four or five months before, when his hands were so much nearer stainless than they could be called at that hour. Now, on the verge of his marriage, and when the double tree of murder that he had planted (murder of character and murder of person!) was about bearing welcome and triumphant fruit, the rooster's cry, so sharp, sudden and unexpected, came to him like the voice of an accusing spirit. It may be taken as a proof of his cowardice when we say that momentarily his cheek whitened and his limbs trembled; and perhaps every criminal is a coward, because he dares not do right and trust the event with the overruling providences. But Egbert Crawford was no physical coward, as we may have occasion to know before we have closed this relation. Yet he did whiten, and he did tremble. Was there something ominous in this sudden disturbance of the Sabbath quiet? Did it foreshadow another and a more startling disturbance, through which the dark, silent current of the river of guilt would be splashed into by the falling stones of the temple of error overhanging it? Was there in it an omen of the sudden flash of a bright and unendurable light through those black caverns, hitherto supposed to be impenetrable, where crawl the loathsome and slimy reptiles of deceit and treachery?