Such was the blood of Robert Brand, and such had been the influences and surroundings of his earlier life—himself a soldier when in possession of health and vigor, and the companion, friend and guardian of the noblest of all American soldiery when he became disabled and inactive. He loved his native land with an idolatry bordering on insanity; and during the long struggle between the interests of the sections, preceding the war, he had imbibed love of free institutions and hatred of slavery to a degree little less than fanatical. No regret had weighed so heavily upon him, when the note of conflict sounded in 1861, as the fact that his aged and crippled frame must prevent his striking one blow in a cause so holy; and if he held one pride more dearly than another, it was to be found in the remembrance that he had a noble and gallant son, too busy and too much needed at home, thus far, to join the ranks of his country's defenders in the field, but ready when the day of positive need should come, to maintain unsullied the honor of his race. What marvel, all these surroundings considered, that the knowledge of that son being an abject poltroon should nearly have unseated his reason, and that he should have uttered words which only the partial insanity of wounded pride and rankling shame could supply with any shadow of excuse?
At the close of the last chapter, and before this long explanatory episode intervened to break the progress of the narration, Elsie Brand, the agonized sister and daughter, was seen standing before her father, with hands clasped in agony and lips uttering agonized pleadings. But the very instant after, when the terrible severity of that parental curse had been fully rounded from the lips and that fatal evidence given that for the moment all natural affection had given way to impious rage and denunciation,—the young girl stood erect, her blue eyes still tearful but flashing anger of which they commonly seemed to be little capable, and her lips uttering words as determined as those of the madman, even if they were less furious and vindictive:
"You may strike me if you like, but I do not care for you, now—not one snap of my finger! You are not my father—you are nobody's father, but a bad, wicked, unfeeling old man, gray headed enough to know better, and yet cursing your own flesh and blood as if you wished to go to perdition yourself and carry everybody else along with you!"
The very audacity of this speech partially sobered the enraged man, and he only ejaculated in a lower but still angry tone:
"What!"
"What I say and what I mean!" the young girl went on, oblivious or heedless of any parental authority at the moment. "I do not love you—I hate and shudder at you! I would rather be my poor brother, a coward and disgraced as he may be, than his miserable father cursing him like a brute!"
"Do you dare——" the father began to say, in a louder voice and with the thunder again threatening, but Elsie Brand was proving, just then, that the gift of heedless speech "ran in the family," and that for the moment she "had the floor" in the contest of denunciation.
"Oh, you need not look at me in that manner!" she said, marking the expression of the old man's eyes and conscious that he might at any moment recover himself sufficiently to pour out upon her, for her unpardonable impudence, quite as bitter a denunciation as he had lately vented against her disgraced brother. "I am not afraid of your eyes, or of your tongue. You have turned Carlton out of doors, for a mere nothing, and I am going with him. I will never set foot in this house again, never, until——"
How long was the period the indignant girl intended to set for her absence, must ever remain in doubt, with many other things of much more consequence; for the sentence thus begun, was never completed. In at the open front door, through the parlor and into the room of the invalid, at that moment staggered Kitty Hood. The phrase descriptive of her movement is used advisedly and with good reason; for fright, exhaustion and the terrible heat of the June meridian had reduced the young school-mistress to a most pitiable condition. Her face was one red glow, her brow streamed with perspiration, and she was equally destitute of strength and out of breath.
This strange and unannounced interruption naturally broke the unpleasant chain of conversation between father and daughter; and the eyes of both, during her moment of enforced silence to recover breath, looked upon her with equal wonder and alarm.