"My son a coward! a miserable poltroon to be pointed at, spat upon, and whipped! My blood made a shame in the land, by the one whom I trusted to honor it! God's blackest and deepest curse—"
"Oh, father! father!" broke in the young girl in a very wail of agony so pitiful that it must have moved any heart not calloused for the moment against all natural feeling, but that availed nothing to stop the impending curse or even to lower the voice that uttered it.
"—God's deepest and blackest curse 'light upon the coward! shame, sorrow, and quick death! He shall have neither house, home nor family from this moment! I disown this bastard of my blood! I devote him to ruin and to perdition!"
Few men have ever uttered, over the most criminal and degraded of the offspring of their own loins, so dire an imprecation; and no father, who has ever uttered one approaching it in horrible earnest, but is doomed here or hereafter to feel the bitterest weight of that curse resting upon his own head. Lear was clean distraught by wrongs beyond human endurance, before he called upon "all the stored vengeances of heaven" to fall on the "ingrateful top" of Goneril, and threatened both his unnatural daughters with "such revenges" that they should be the "terrors of the earth"; and only that incipient madness clears him from the sin and leaves him human to demand our after pity. There can be no excuse for such paroxysms of remorseless anger—it is difficult to supply even a palliation. And yet there was something in the blood, in the past life and associations of Robert Brand, coming as near to offering excuse for shame and indignation driving to temporary madness, as could well have been offered in behalf of any man of his day, committing a sin of such nature. And to circumstances embodying these it is now necessary to revert, even at the expense of a temporary pause in the directness of this narration.
CHAPTER V.
The Birth and Blood of the Brands—Pride that came down from the Crusades—Robert Brand as Soldier and Pension-Agent—The Pensioners of the Revolution—How Elsie raved, and how the Father's Curse seemed To Be Answered—Dr. James Holton, and the loss of a Corpus Delicti.
It has already been indicated, in speaking of the ties which bound Elspeth Graeme to the Brand family, that they were Scots by descent as she was by both blood and birth. Robert Brand himself stood in the fourth remove from Gaelic nativity, without the spirit of his race being extinct or even modified. When Archibald Alexander, father of that William Alexander who claimed to be Earl of Stirling in the peerage of Scotland while he was gallantly fighting as a Major-General in the patriot army of the Revolution, came to America in 1740, he was accompanied by a man who claimed to hold quite as good blood as himself, though he served in little less than a menial capacity to the heir of the attainted house of Stirling. This was Malcolm Brand, of Perthshire, a member of the Scottish and elder branch of the Brands of Hertfordshire in England, who at a later day carried the two crossed swords which they had borne on their shields since the Crusades, to augment the threatening bulls, wolves and leopards of the Dacres, in the possession of that barony. It was in a victorious hand-to-hand fight with a gigantic Saracen on the field of Askalon, that Gawin de Brande, laird of Westenro in Lothian, fighting close beside King Richard, won that proud quartering of arms; and it is to be believed that no descendant of his blood, either in 1740 or in 1863, had quite forgotten that exploit or the fact that the very name of the family was only another antique appellation for the sword.
Malcolm Brand, the emigrant, was the father of a son Robert, born in New Jersey, as Archibald Alexander was the sire of William, who so proudly outdid the exploits of his elder blood, fighting under the leadership of Washington. The two young men, resident nearly together among the New Jersey hills, entered the army at the same time, and while the one rose to the dignity of a Major-General, the other shared in his combats at Long Island, Germantown and Monmouth, always fighting gallantly, but never rising beyond the grade of a first-lieutenant, and dying at last a prisoner on one of the pest-ships of the Wallabout. His son William, named after Lord Stirling and born in 1768, had of course passed as a boy through the trying period of the great contest, known that identification with the patriot cause inevitable from anxiety for a father engaged in it and grief over his lingering death by disease and privation for its sake; and it could not be otherwise than that the ears of his son, Robert (the man of 1863), should have been filled with relations calculated at once to keep alive the pride of his blood and to identify him with the glory and honor of the land in which his lot had been cast.
Then had come another influence, not less potent—the second breaking-out of hostilities against England, in the War of 1812. The blood of the Brands was not cooled—it sprung to arms; and Robert Brand, then a young lawyer, taking the place of his father already invalided, assumed the sword of his armorial bearings and fought with Scott at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane, receiving so terrible an injury in the leg, at the close of the latter battle, that he was to be a tortured cripple from that day forward, but glorying even in the disablement and the suffering, because his injury had not been met in some trivial accident of peaceful life, but sustained where brave men dared their doom.