The Coward: A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863

by Henry Morford

"The man who says that my son is disloyal, lies!" cried the old man, interrupting him. "You, or any other man!"

"It was not on the ground of his disloyalty that he was suspected!" sneered the doctor.

"And what ground then?" asked the father, his face and his whole manner showing something terrible within that could be only partially suppressed.

"The ground of his cowardice, since you will have it!" spoke the doctor, in such a tone of fiendish exultation as Mephistopheles may have used to Faust, at the moment of assuring him that the last hope of happiness on earth or pardon from heaven had been swept away in the slaughter of Valentine and the moral murder of Marguerite. "There is not an officer in the Reserves, who heard him refuse to join the regiment this morning, but believes him—yes, knows him, to be an arrant poltroon."

"Doctor Philip Pomeroy, you are a liar as well as a traitor and a scoundrel! If I had two legs, and still was, as I am, old enough to be your father, you would not leave this house without broken bones! Get out of it, send me your bill to-morrow, or even to-day, and never let me see you set foot in it again while I live!"

The face of the old man was fearful, at that juncture. In spite of the pain of his disabled limb, he had grasped his cane and struggled to a standing position, before concluding his violent words; and as he concluded, passion overcame all prudence, and the heavy cane went by the doctor's head, crashing through the window and taking its way out into the garden, at the same moment when his limb gave way and he sunk back into his chair with a groan that was almost a shriek, clutching at the bell-rope that hung near him and nearly tearing it from its fastenings.

Dr. Pomeroy said not another word, whatever he might have felt. He had dodged the flying cane, by not more than an inch, and such chances are not likely to improve the temper of even the most amiable. For one instant there was something in his face that might have threatened personal revenge of the violence as well as the unpardonable words, in spite of the difference of age: then the sneer crept over his face again, he stepped out through the parlor into the hall, took his hat, and the next moment was bowling down the lane into the road, behind his fast-trotting bay. It seemed likely that his last professional visit to the Brands had been paid, even if it had not yet been paid for!

The terrible appeal of the master of the house to the bell-rope at his hand was answered the moment after by the appearance of a woman of so remarkable an aspect as to be worthy of quite as much attention as either of the personages who have before been called, in the same room, to the reader's attention. Her dress was that of a housekeeper or upper servant, though the height of her carriage and the erectness of her figure might have stamped her as an empress. And in truth that figure did not need any such extraordinary carriage to develop it, for, as compared with the ordinary stature of woman, it was little else than gigantic. The man who built a door for Elspeth Graeme, less than six feet in the clear, subjected her to imminent danger of bringing up with a "bump" every time she entered it; and her broad, square, bony figure showed that all the power of her frame had not been frittered away in length. Her hands were large and masculine, though by no means ill-shaped, and her foot had not only the tread supposed to belong to that of the coarser sex, but very nearly its size. In face she was broad yet still longer of feature, with hair that had been light brown before the gray sifted itself so thickly among it as to render the color doubtful,—with eyes of bluish gray, a strong and somewhat coarse mouth with no contemptible approach to a moustache of light hairs bristling at the corners,—and with complexion wrinkled and browned by the exposures of at least sixty years, until very nearly the last trace of what had once been youth and womanhood was worn away and forgotten. Yet there was something very good and very kindly amid the rugged strength of the face; and while little children might at the first glance have feared the old woman and run away from her as a "witch," they would at the second certainly have crept back to her knees and depended upon a protection which they were certain to receive.

It is only necessary, to say, in addition, that she was Scottish by birth as well as by blood and name—that she had come to this country nearly forty years before, when Robert Brand was a young man, and attached herself to the fortunes of the family because they were Scottish by blood and she was the very incarnation of faithful feudality—that his daughter had been named Elspeth (since softened to Elsie) at her earnest desire, because she said the name was "the bonniest ava" and she had herself been named after a noble lady who bore it, in her own land, and who had done much to give her that upright carriage by standing as her god-mother—and that for many a long year, now, she had been the working head of the Brand household, scarcely more so since the death of its weak, hysterical mistress, a dozen years before, than while she was alive and pretending to a management which she never understood.

If any one person beneath that roof, more legitimately than another, belonged to the family and felt herself so belonging, that person was Elspeth Graeme; and if something of the romantic, which the stern sense of the father would have been slow to approve, had grown up in both his children, it was to the partial love of Elspeth and her stories of Scottish romance, poetry, history, song and superstition, carrying them away from prosaic America to the wimpling burns and haunted glens of the land from which their blood had been derived,—that such a feeling, fortunate or unfortunate as the future might prove, was principally to be credited.