Egbert Crawford.
In a moment more this note was sealed and directed to "Miss Josephine Harris—Care of Miss Crawford" and left lying on the table, with the superscription upward. Then Colonel Egbert Crawford put on his hat, walked deliberately down-stairs and out at the front of the house. No one seemed to observe him—not even a domestic, and probably nothing would have pleased him better at that moment. Walking down the lane to the road, he turned up the road to the left, went up to a little country tavern where he had sometimes hired a riding-horse on previous visits, and hired a horse and buggy, with a driver, to go at once to Utica. Ten minutes completed the negotiation, and ten more harnessed up the horse to the vehicle; so that before the call to dinner was made at the Crawford mansion, before old John Crawford was assisted in from the portico, or Mary thought of the arbiter of her destiny as elsewhere than in his own room,—he was bowling down the dusty road towards Utica. When the down-train from Suspension Bridge left Utica for Albany that afternoon, the detected and beaten gambler in reputations, lives and matrimonial ventures, was a passenger.
CHAPTER XXV.
Affairs in the Crawford Family in New York—The Two Brothers—Marion Hobart the Enigma—Niagara by way of the Central Park.
It has been already said that John Crawford, wounded, and with the poor little Virginian orphan-girl in his company, reached New York on the evening of the Fourth of July—the same evening, it will be remembered, on which Tom Leslie and Josephine Harris left the city, the one for Niagara and the other for her matrimonial operations at West Falls. It is just possible that their not arriving earlier was a lucky event, as Joe Harris, had she once set eyes on the delicate and singular-looking Virginian girl, would have been almost certainly attracted towards her, and in that event her pet hobby for the time might have been neglected—her departure for the North might have been delayed for a day or two—and Mary Crawford might have been left to meet her fate in helplessness and ignorance.
And yet all this is an array of "mights" that have no real propriety, for events occur but once in the world, and they only occur in one mode. Human will is free, and human responsibility is never to be ignored; and still no human hand changes in any degree the inevitable. "Oh, if I had!" and "Oh, if I had not!" are very common exclamations, and those who have committed terrible errors or met with severe misfortunes will continue to make them until the whole course of human existence is run; and yet they are none the less follies. The events of yesterday were part of that general plan on which the world was first formed and on which it may have been conducted through all the hundreds of centuries which puzzle Agassiz and frighten the theologists. The downfall of an empire and the picking up of a basket of chips by a ragged child in a ship-yard, may each have equally formed part of it, and each been equally impossible to avert. Human will seemed to move each event, and human responsibility certainly attached to each; but the event itself, unknown until accomplished, moved in its appointed course and could no more be jarred from it than one of the planets from its orbit.
But all this by the way. Joe Harris had her own odd work to do, hundreds of miles away, and there was no hindrance in the way of her accomplishing it, from any new ties suddenly added to bind her to the city.
Of course that strange and unexpected arrival from the seat of war (for John Crawford had not even taken the precaution to telegraph from Fortress Monroe or Washington) created a sensation in the Crawford household. A mixed sensation—for while both the brothers were heartily glad to meet, each had a cause for sorrow on meeting the other. Richard was naturally sorry to see John, who had passed through so many fights without harm, wounded at last and disabled for an indefinite period; and John was correspondingly sorry to see Richard, whom he had left in such high health and spirits, a broken-down and house-ridden invalid. Not long before he had another cause for anxiety; for in the first half hour of private conference which ensued, on the very evening of their arrival, in response to a question from John, as to the health of the family at West Falls and the progress of his expected marriage with Mary, Richard revealed the unaccountable state of coldness which had sprung up, Mary's neglect to answer his late letters, and the fact that Egbert remained all the visiting-link between the city and country branches of the family.
"Egbert, eh?" asked John, whose service at looking out for skulking enemies when on picket-duty, might have made him more watchful and suspicious than he would have been under other circumstances. "Egbert, eh? Well, all I can say is that I don't like the link!"