"I am afraid I was guilty of all those offences!" answered the invalid, with something nearer to a smile of mischief glimmering from the corner of his eye than had shone there for many a day.
"I did hear something in your voice the first night that I saw you there, and afterwards," Margaret Hayley went on, "which made me shudder from its echo of yours; and more than once I saw that in your face which won me to you without my knowing why. Yet all the impression wore off by degrees, and—only think of it!—I was nearly on the point, at one time, of believing that I had found a truer ideal than the one so lately lost, and of promising to become the wife of Horace Townsend! Think where you would have been, you heartless deceiver, if I had fallen altogether into the trap and done so!"
"I think I might have endured that successful rivalry better than any other!" was the very natural reply.
"And this man," said Robert Brand, standing close beside the bed, looking down at his son with a face in which pride and joy had mastered its great trouble of a few days before, and apparently speaking quite as much to himself as to either of his auditors—"this man, capable of such deeds of godlike bravery in ordinary life, and then of winning the applause of a whole army in the very front of battle,—I cursed and despised as a coward! God forgive me!—and you, my son, try to forget that ever I set myself up as your pitiless judge, to be punished as few fathers have ever been punished who yet had the sons of their love spared to them! Margaret—how have we both misunderstood him!"
"The fault was not all yours, by any means," said the invalid. "How could either of you know me when I misunderstood and belied myself!"
And in that remark—the last word uttered by Carlton Brand before he yielded to the exhaustion of his last hour of imprudent excitement and fell away to a slumber almost as profound as death, just as the old doctor stepped back to forbid a longer interview, and while the shadows of evening began to fall within the little room, and Margaret Hayley sat by his bedside and held his hand in hers with what was plainly a grasp never to be broken again during the lives of both, and Robert Brand, sitting but a little farther away, watched the son that had been lost and was found, with a deeper tenderness and a holier pride than he had ever felt when bending over the pillow of his sleeping childhood,—in that remark, we say, lay the key to all which had so affected his life, and which eventually gave cause for this somewhat singular and desultory narration. He had misunderstood himself; and only pain, suffering and a mental agony more painful than any physical death, had been able to bring himself and those who best knew him to a full knowledge of the truth. Only a part of that truth he knew even then, when he lay in the officers' ward of the Alexandria hospital: it is our privilege to know it all and to explain it, so far as explanation can be given, in a few words.
Carlton Brand had been gifted, and cursed, from childhood, with an intense and imaginative temperament, never quite regulated or even analyzed. His sense of honor had been painfully delicate—his love of approbation so strong as to be little less than a disease. Some mishap of his weak, hysterical and short-lived mother, no doubt, had given him one terrible weakness, entirely physical, but which he believed to be mental—he habitually fainted at the sight of blood. (This fact will explain, parenthetically, why he fell senseless and apparently dead at that period in the encounter with Dick Compton when the blood gushed over the face of the latter from his blow; and why after each of the excitements of the Pool and Mount Willard he suffered in like manner, at the instant when his eyes met the fatal sign on the faces of the rescued.) High cultivation of the imaginative faculty, the habit of living too much within himself, and a constitutional predisposition in that direction, had made him painfully nervous—a weakness which to him, and eventually to others, assumed the shape of cowardice. Recklessly brave, in fact, and never troubled by that nervousness for one moment when his sympathies were excited and his really magnificent physical and gymnastic powers called into play,—that fainting shudder at the sight of blood had been all the while his haunting demon, disgracing him in his own eyes and marring a life that would otherwise have been very bright and pleasant. One belief had fixed itself in his mind, long before the period of this narration, and never afterwards (until now) been driven thence—that if he should ever be brought into conflict among deadly weapons, this horror of blood would make him run away like a poltroon, disgracing himself forever and breaking the hearts of all who loved him. This belief had made his commission in the Reserves a melancholy farce; this had placed him in the power of Dr. Philip Pomeroy and prevented that exposure and that punishment so richly deserved; this had made his life, after the breaking out of the war, one long struggle to avoid what he believed must be disgraceful detection. Once more, so that the matter which informs this whole relation may be fairly understood,—Carlton Brand, merely a high-strung, imaginative, nervous man, with the bravery of the old Paladins latent in his heart and bursting out occasionally in actions more trying than the facing of any battery that ever belched forth fire and death,—had all the while mistaken that nervousness for cowardice;—just as many a man who has neither heart, feeling nor imagination, strides through the world and stalks over the battle-field, wrapped in his mantle of ignorance and stolidity, believing himself and impressing the belief upon others, that this is indomitable bravery.
What Carlton Brand had believed himself to be when untried—what Carlton Brand had proved himself to be when hatred to Captain Hector Coles and a despairing hope of yet winning the love of Margaret Hayley moved him to the trial—how thorough a contrast!—how exact an antagonism! And how many of us, perhaps, going backward from the glass in which we have more or less closely beheld our natural faces, forget, if we have ever truly read, "what manner of men" we are!
And here another explanation must follow, as we may well believe that it followed between the three so strangely reunited, when rest and repose had worn off the first shock of meeting and made it safe for the petted invalid to meet another pressure from those rose-leaf lips that had forsaken all their pride to bend down and touch him with a penitent blessing—safe to speak and to hear of the many things which the parted always treasure against re-union. That explanation concerns the mystery of the passenger by the Cunarder, the American in England, and the man who under the name of Carlton Brand perished from the deck of the Emerald off Kingstown harbor? Had he a double life as well as a double nature? Or had there been some unaccountable personation? The latter, of course, and from causes and under circumstances not one whit surprising when the key is once supplied.
It will be remembered that Carlton Brand, very soon after his purchase of a ticket for Liverpool by the Cunard steamer and his indulging that nervousness which he believed to be cowardice with a little shuddering horror at the mass of coal roaring and blazing in the furnaces of the government transport, early in July,—had a visiter at his rooms at the Fifth Avenue Hotel—Henry Thornton, of Philadelphia, a brother lawyer and intimate friend. It will also be remembered that the two held a long and confidential conversation, very little of the purport of which was then given. The facts, a part of them thus far concealed, were that Carlton Brand, flying from his disgrace, really intended to go to Europe as he had informed Elsie; that he made no secret of that disgrace, to Thornton; that the latter informed him, incidentally, of what he had heard of the summer plans of Margaret Hayley and her mother, whom he knew through his family; that the passage-ticket, lying upon the table, came under the notice of Thornton, inducing the information that he was also on his way to England, in chase of a criminal who had absconded with a large sum of money belonging to one of the Philadelphia banks, and whom he had means, if once he could overtake him, of forcing to disgorge; that Thornton half-jestingly proposed, remembering their partial resemblance, that if his friend had grown ashamed of his name, he would take that and the ticket and pursue the criminal with less chance of being evaded, his own cognomen being kept in the dark; that Brand, suddenly taken with the idea and struck with the facility which the use of his name by the other would furnish for creating the belief that he had himself gone abroad, and thus concealing his identity while remaining at home, adopted the suggestion and supplied his friend at once with name and ticket, for his travelling purposes; that it was Henry Thornton and not Carlton Brand who ran that mad quest about England, a hidden criminal always in view, and frequenting the most doubtful places and the most disreputable society to accomplish the object of his search; and that it was poor Thornton and not Carlton Brand who perished in the Irish Channel and met that lowly grave in the Howth church-yard. All this while the real owner of that name, shaving away his curling beard, tinging his fair skin with a very easily-obtained chemical preparation, dyeing black his hair and moustache and making himself up as nearly as possible like Thornton, under the assumed designation of Horace Townsend, suggested by the initials of his "double," was carrying out that long masquerade which we have been permitted to witness.