"Dick Compton was right, after all, and I was a fool to try to keep him away! If he had obeyed me, I should have despised him now; and if he has not been killed in that terrible battle and lives to come home again, I will tell him how wrong I was, and what a ninny I made of myself, and how sorry I am for every word I spoke that day, and how much better I love him because he obeyed the call of his country instead of the poor, weak, miserable voice of a frightened woman!"
And it was of Gettysburgh and the desperate fighting around Cemetery Hill that Robert Brand had been reading, on the same Sunday afternoon, sitting in the shade of his own piazza, when he hurled out these bitter words, which poor little Elsie heard as she lay upon the lounge in the parlor within:
"This is what he has lost, the low-lived, contemptible poltroon! My son, and to shirk a great battle! He might have been dead now, and in a grave better than any house in which he can ever hide his miserable life; or he might have had something to remember and boast of all his days—that he was one of the Men of Gettysburgh! If I had two legs, I would go out and find him yet and shoot him with my own hand—the infernal cowardly cur!"
And then the disgraced and irate father tried to forget his son and to bury himself in other details of the great battle.
The sister did not reply aloud to her father's renewed objurgation. She merely sobbed a little and took from her bosom a crumpled note and read it over again for perhaps the fiftieth time, muttering low as she did so:
"Oh, father, father! If you knew how far you would need to go to seek poor Carlton and make him even more miserable than he is, and how little chance you have of ever seeing him again while you live—perhaps you would not speak so cruelly of him." Then she kissed the crumpled note again and put it back into her bosom, and tried to compose herself once more to that sleep which the tropical heat invited and her aching heart forbade.
From the tone of that letter, it would seem that Elsie had written to her brother, to his place of business in the city, when fully aware of the unreasonable indignation which moved her father, advising him not to risk serious personal insult by coming home until he should again hear from her,—and that he had replied, from a place much farther away, informing her of his intention to put seas between himself and the eyes of all who had looked upon his disgrace. But better even this long separation—thought the young girl—than a return which would induce words between father and son, never to be forgiven or forgotten while either held life and memory. Years might mellow the recollection and change the feeling—years when the country should no longer make demands upon her children to breast the battle storm in her behalf, and when the eloquent voice in the halls of justice and the active, busy life in deeds securing the common welfare, might be sufficient to win new honor and blot away any recollection of that single sad misstep in the career of manhood. Poor, gentle, loving, faithful little Elsie Brand!—it may be long before we have occasion to look upon her again, and indeed she becomes henceforth but a comparative shadow; so let it be put upon record here that she seemed "faithful among the faithless" in practising the great lessons of hope and charity. The father might utter curses to be set down against his own soul in the day when human words as well as human actions must be called into judgment; friends might look askance and enemies gloat over the disgrace of one who had before stood high above them in all the details of honorable character; even the sweetheart, whose pulses had once beaten so close to his that the twin currents seemed flowing into one—even she might find some poor excuse of pride to falsify her by-gone boast that she loved him better than all the world, and let that hollow, wordy "honor" work their eternal separation: all this might be, but the sister had no such license to waver in the course of her affection towards one who had been fondled by the same hands in babyhood and drawn sustenance from the same maternal bosom as herself. And no treason, all this, to the truths and the eternities of other loves. All other relations may sooner change than that which binds sister and brother, whose fondness has not been tainted by some falsehood in blood or chilled by some wrong in education. Wife or mistress, yesterday cold, may be to-day throbbing with the most intense warmth of absorbing passion, and to-morrow chilled again by instability in herself or unworthiness in the object of her regard: even the mother, that tenderest friend of song and story and sometimes of real life, may scatter her affections wide among so many children that each has but the pauper's share, or form new ties and forget that ever the old existed. But the brother, if he be not the veriest libel upon that sacred name, clings with undying fondness to the sister; and the sister, ever faithful, clings to the brother "through evil and through good report," when one or even both may have become a scoff and a bye-word in every mouth that opens to speak their names. Happy those men for whom the bond has never been either frayed or broken: sad for those who ever look back through the long years and see some sunny head of childhood hiding itself beneath the falling clods of the church-yard, that might have nestled closer to them in after years than all whom they have grasped, and cherished, and chilled, and lost!
It now becomes necessary to inquire the whereabouts of Carlton Brand, the subject of so much sisterly love and so much fatherly indignation, at that second period when Gettysburgh was a glorious novelty, its bloody splendors flashing broad over the loyal States. And those whereabouts may very readily be discovered. On the register of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the city of New York, his name had been inscribed on the Wednesday evening previous to Gettysburgh (the first day of July); and those among our readers who may have chanced to be sojourners at the Fifth Avenue during that week, and who will take the trouble to read over again the close and accurate description given of the lawyer on his first appearance in the presence of his sister and Margaret Hayley, in the second chapter of this narration, may not find much difficulty in remembering the appearance of so marked a man at the hotel at that period—the glances of admiration cast upon his handsome face and manly figure as he sat at table or moved quietly among the ever-changing crowd in the reading-room or down the long halls—the almost total silence which he maintained, seeming to have no acquaintances or to be anxious for escape from all conversation—his inquiring more than once every day at the office for letters which continually disappointed him—and the expression of drooping-eyed melancholy in face and restless unquiet in movement, which gave rise to many side remarks and led to many singular speculations.
He was alone—at least alone at the hotel; and Dr. Pomeroy, if he had entertained any actual belief in his suggested elopement between the lawyer and his "ward," might easily have satisfied himself, had he followed him to the commercial metropolis, that no such elopement had taken place or that the abductor had hidden his paramour carefully away and managed to keep continually out of her presence.
Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time; and the writer, without any wish or will to do so, yields to the necessity, very much as the proud man of the world yields to the pressure when events which he has assumed to direct grow too mighty for his hand and bear him away in their rush and tumult,—or as a father—to use a yet stronger and more painful image—submits with a groan and a prayer when the child of his dear love shuts the heart against him and breaks away from that tender control which it has been alike his duty and his pleasure to supply. Some of our mental children, especially when they are so real that time, place and circumstance cannot be made for them at will, are sadly unmanageable; and this instance furnishes an illustration which will be better understood at a later period. Acts may yet be recorded, while yet acts remain to record; but the heart closes, motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events without connection and actions without explanation.