"—Girding on his sword," the Judge went on, "and marching—"
"—Up and down Broadway!" put in the young girl, in a second parenthesis, not more audible than the other.
"That is, he has not marched, but is going to march to the seat of war, to fight for—"
"—The niggers!" again and finally interpolated the incorrigible, who had somehow managed to get a peep behind the curtain of national affairs and to see towards what the great struggle seemed tending.
"—For the defence of the country," the Judge concluded his peroration. Then he went on with the pith of his remark, to the effect that the girl who could be mad enough and disobedient enough to refuse the hand of such a man as that, might go to—mumble—mumble—mumble—for she could never more be daughter of his!
By this time Emily had recovered her equanimity, and almost her spirits, and her mother shared in the feeling of relief, for the explosion had not been half so violent as expected. But there are pauses in storms, the moment before the coming of the most destructive blasts of all, and the temper of Judge Owen was gusty. Miss Emily fancied that the whole ought to be said while the subject was under discussion, and, to use a vulgarism, she "put her foot in it."
"Boad Bancker," she said (she had the common weakness of supposing that the use of a nickname belittled the person spoken of)—"Boad Bancker may be a soldier, but nobody knows it. I know he is a fool; and he is a miserable humbug, pretending to be a young man, when he is as old as you, Pa!"
If Judge Owen had a weakness unworthy one of the shining lights of the bench, it lay in thinking that his fifty years were only thirty, and that he was yet a young man. Other men than the Judge have labored under the same delusion, and found sick rooms and decrepitude necessary to disabuse them. Probably nothing in his daughter's power to utter would have made him so angry. He had only muttered before—this time he thundered.
"Old! You are talking about age, are you, you shameless, impertinent hussy—insulting me as well as my friends, are you! I know you, and by G—" (he was a dignitary of the legal profession, and he was speaking in the presence of his wife and daughter; but the truth must be recorded)—"I know what you are driving at, and I'll break you of your fancy or I'll break your stubborn neck! You don't like Bancker, the husband I pick out for you, because he is not a beardless boy, and you choose to consider him old. And you think I will permit you to encourage that miserable beggar, Frank Wallace, because he is young! Let me see one more sign of familiarity between him and yourself, and I will kick him out of the house, as I would a dog—and you may go after him! Do you hear me? Now look out!" And the Judge rang the bell for the servant, scolded her for not lighting the gas that no one had before wished lighted, and stormed out of the room, leaving his wife to follow him, and his daughter to drop again into her chair and muse over the pleasant prospect for after-life lying so broadly before her.
But if the young girl had passed through an agitating and unpleasant scene, and if the prospects for her future life had been sensibly narrowed within the preceding half hour, the depths of her being had not been stirred as they were to be before she slept. Perhaps she had occupied the position of depression into which she had fallen, in the chair by the window, with her head upon her hand, for five minutes—a bitter sea of thought surging through her mind, and her flash of resolution so giving way before her father's terrible anger, that she felt almost ready to sacrifice her happiness, life, every thing, to obey him and secure peace—when a hand was laid gently upon her shoulder, and the quiet face of Aunt Martha, framed in its widow's cap, peered into her own.