When the banquet is over, whether the guests have been fully satisfied or the opposite, there may still remain a few trifles which must be discussed, if the proper respect is to be shown to each other and the entertainer. When a story is almost ended, there may still remain a fragmentary portion, perhaps not altogether worthy of attention from those who have so far followed the fortunes of the different personages involved, and yet impossible to ignore without manifesting a disregard of the whole entertainment. To that stage this narrative has reached, and all that remains is a hasty grouping together of those closing events for which all that have preceded them would seem to have been intended by the fates that overruled them.
It will be remembered that Josephine Harris, when first recovered from the disappointment of Richard Crawford's absence from the city, penned a letter and mailed it to Niagara, giving him a rapid detail of all that she had been doing in his behalf—of events at West Falls—and of the absolute necessity that he should at once apply some of his marvellously recovered strength to the purposes of a journey thither. That letter, which should have reached Niagara as soon as the travellers themselves, suffered the fate of many-letters that are sent upon matters of life and death with the magic word "haste" in the lower left-hand corner; and was not delivered at the Cataract House until Saturday morning. Perhaps it was quite as well that the detention had occurred on the road, for by that means the partially-recovered invalid was spared two excitements in one day, which might have seriously prostrated him.
Even as it was, the shock was a sudden and hazardous one, to a system no more thoroughly restored than Richard Crawford's. He received that letter on Saturday morning, with several others from the city, and went up to his own room to read them. From prudential reasons, Bell, on the disappearance of Marion Hobart, had taken the vacated room, adjoining that of her brother; and when he had been for a few moments alone after his return from the hotel "post-office," she was startled by what seemed to be a groan issuing from his room. Instantly running to the door and tapping, when she entered she found him sitting on the side of the bed, white as the counterpane that covered it, and breathing heavily. She flew at once to his side, applied the restoratives at hand, and had the joy of seeing him almost instantly recover breath and voice. Then it was that she observed that he held a letter in his hand, and that letter he tendered her. She read, and her own excitement was scarcely less than that of her brother. Now for the first time she understood the strange words with reference to the destinies of her family, which had been uttered by the sybil, and which had done so much to change the very nature of, her womanhood. And what a revelation was here to her, of the mental torture which Richard must have experienced through all his long hopeless illness—of the uncomplaining patience with which he had borne what must have seemed to him the crushing out of all the best hopes of his life—of the murderous depravity which could exist in the heart of one connected with her by the dear ties of blood, and daily taken by the hand and trusted—and of the singular character of that young girl whom she had observed so much and known so little, and to whose efforts seemed to be owing all this happiness budding and blossoming out of the ashes of past misery.
An hour restored the equanimity of Richard Crawford, though several would be needed before he could recover all the strength of which he had been temporarily deprived by the shock. But joy does not kill, like grief; nor does it even enervate for any long period. Only a little time elapsed before the steadfast lover, to whom the promise of joy was again open after so long an obscuration, decided that he must and would be strong enough to ride to Utica that night and to West Falls on Sunday morning. He could not be allowed to go alone, and of course Bell, who would not dissuade him, had no alternative but to accompany him With a few words of apology to Walter Harding, for thus making a last break into what would otherwise have been a pleasant sojourn of some days at the Falls, and leaving him entirely alone,—but with the explanation that family affairs of the gravest importance demanded their presence in the neighborhood of Utica,—they left Niagara on Saturday afternoon, slept a portion of the night at Utica, and reached West Falls on Sunday morning, the Twelfth—a week from that eventful Sunday on which the destinies of the whole Crawford family seemed to have been played for, lost and won, in the little parlor of Aunt Betsey Halstead.
It is an old story which can never be told over half so well as it can be acted—that of the meeting of lovers who have been once estranged by wrong or misunderstanding. It was a trying moment when Mary Crawford, altogether ignorant of the time of his coming, even if he would ever again come at all,—was called to meet the man whom she had so wronged and misunderstood. But how to perform the rites of reconciliation, is one of the sublime mysteries which Nature teaches when she gives us the other holy lessons of love; and who doubts that the cousin-lovers clasped each other more fondly, and with a better knowledge of what each was worth to the other, in the meeting embrace of that Sunday morning, than they might ever have done during their whole lives if the tongue of slander and the hand of injustice had not come temporarily between them?
Their connection with this narration closes here. Poor old John Crawford is yet living, though dying daily with weakness and the gradual wearing away of the very power of life. Mary Crawford is a wife, and has been since Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of November, 1862, on which day—the day preceding the annual Thanksgiving—Richard Crawford religiously believes that he repaid himself for all by-gone wrongs and misunderstandings. For some cause, with which his past sufferings and his changed domestic relations may have had more or less to do, he has never yet joined the army of which he has always been thinking with a longing desire. His pen has not been idle, even in his happiness—may not that have done his appointed work? It need scarcely be said that the friendship between the people of the big house on the hill, and those of the little Halstead house in the village, though for a time interrupted by pride and neglect, has since been more warmly cemented than ever before,—and that when little Susy marries the engineer, as she will probably do before the summer closes, there will be no warmer prayers put up for their happiness, than those uttered by two who have trodden the same path but a little while before them.
We have not chosen to depict the storm which followed the sudden departure of Colonel John Boadley Bancker from the house of Judge Owen, near the Harlem River. That there was a storm, is undeniable—such a storm as the burly Judge had (and still retains) the faculty of getting up at the shortest notice. One of those blind, indiscriminate storms, which having no justice have no direction, and which consequently hurt no one, though they offend all. Frank Wallace, for daring to play such a masquerade in his house and offend a guest—Josephine Harris, for being an accessory before or after the fact, to the plot (the pompous man never knew which)—Emily for having been always a disobedient daughter and a disgrace to the family, this event being another of the abundant proofs thereof—Mrs. Owen and Aunt Martha for daring to live in the same house where such things were about to occur, without preventing them, whether they knew of the arrangement or not,—all received their share in this blast of denunciation; and yet, strangely enough, all survived it, and not one even quitted the house in disgust.
Colonel John Boadley Bancker has never since entered the house or held any intercourse with its inmates. He would quite as soon, we suspect, change places with Driesbach and tame a few tigers and hyenas for exhibition, as trust himself once more to the tender mercies of people who detected and laughed at him. If he prays (which is doubtful) he prays first to be delivered from the wiles and machinations of a demon in petticoats named Joe Harris. He does not wear shoulder-straps or a blue uniform. He has not been drafted, and probably will not be, even in the new eight-hundred-thousand levy. He is said to be still speculating, and making money; and there have been rumors that he is looking for a "job" in the operations of the Harbor-Defence Commissioners of the City of New York.[18] But as those Commissioners are well known to be beyond the reach of those evil influences which have made other operations of the war a little costly beyond their return,—he cannot do otherwise than fail in this instance.