Rutledge

by Miriam Coles Harris

Who needs be told the career on which the boy entered? Who but would sicken and turn away from the record of his houseless wanderings, his desperate shifts, his recklessness and wickedness. Who that could read with anything but sorrow of the scenes of squalid want, of cunning vice, of mad profligacy, through which he passed before his youth was yet begun. There could be but one result; all that was weak in him was bent to the service of sin, all that was noble was turned to bitterness; the refinement of his nature made him rise, but it was to no heights of truth and virtue; ambition had taken the place of all noble aspirations, and sustained him through ignominy, and reproach, and poverty, helped him to trample on difficulties that would have daunted a less desperate man, and scruples that would have shaken a better one, aided him to free himself from the pollutions that his wild boyhood had contracted, and to shake off the trammels of the past, and crown himself with the success that he had made his god. But through it all, there lived a fear lest the forgotten stain of his birth should be revived, the foundation stone be pulled from his fair fabric of good fortune; and this morbid dread so haunted him, that he came to hate the very sunshine and soft air of France, to fear the very children in the streets, the strangers whose curious eyes he met in the thoroughfares of business. And with all the fearful and enslaved of the earth, he turned his eyes toward the fair land that promises absolution and new life to the sinful and miserable of other lands, and denies its rich benison of hope and freedom neither to the criminal who flies from justice, nor the miserable who flies from memory. With three thousand miles of ocean between him and France, perhaps he could shake off the slavish dread that gnawed forever at his peace, and rise to a position where he need not fear its sting. The untainted air of that new land had never heard the whisper of his shame, should never hear it; even in his own bosom, it should die forgotten and unfeared.

But than his strong will, there had been a stronger. Within the first week of his arrival in America, he was seized with a malignant fever, and from delirium and raving, sunk to stupor and an almost death-like torpor, and for weeks lay so. When at last he rallied and shook off the lethargy that had so long dulled intelligence and feeling, it was to find, that in the first hours of his delirium, he had betrayed his secret and undone himself; and betrayed it to a man whom neither honor nor pity could bind, but whose cunning malice gloated over the power his discovery had invested him with, and who would use it maliciously and unscrupulously. It did no good to rave and curse his fate; all the power of his strong will must go to the repairing of the error, and to the hushing and pacifying this low man who held him at such advantage. It seemed an easy enough thing at first; the man was ready to promise silence and assure him of his good will, and seemed to require nothing in return but good fellowship and confidence. Anything would have been easier for Victor to have given; his proud spirit revolted at such companionship and bondage, but at the first sign of contempt or impatience, the glistening serpent showed his sting, and chafed and despairing, the victim felt the toils tighten around him. There was no escape from his familiarity; he haunted and exasperated him, dogged his steps, followed him into the company of men who could not but wonder at the intimacy and draw their own conclusions from his endurance of such a man.

With the exception of this cruel drawback, the new land indeed proved an Eldorado to Victor. Friends thickened, fortune smiled; he rose with hasty steps to success, social and commercial. Only the sly gleam of Dr. Hugh's treacherous eye sent an occasional fear through the pride of his heart, and kept it in a sort of check. But it did not humble him, it only galled and goaded him, and quickened his determination to prove himself a man for a' that; it strengthened his haughtiness and self-reliance. In the course of a year or two, however, circumstances somewhat changed; Dr. Hugh left the city, and Victor breathed freer. Occasional letters still reached him, keeping him in mind, but they ceased after awhile, and the young adventurer began to feel secure; he was on the road to fortune, the only barrier to success was gone, and the happiness he had never dared enjoy before, seemed just within his grasp. And just then, just when the new hopes of love, and the nearly crowned ambition, most demanded the hiding of the hated secret, chance threw him upon the only man who held it. No wonder that his cheek had blanched the evening that he came to Rutledge, when he found the doctor there before him. The doctor had not forgotten, the doctor had not lost sight of him, though he had lost sight of the doctor, and soon his stealthy hand was on the festering wound again, and his old cunning at work to exasperate his victim, and with a new zest.

That Victor had been a successful man of business he had not minded; it only made his power over him the more desirable, and the remuneration for his silence greater; but that Victor should be the successful lover of one whom he had reason to regard with resentment and aversion, was too severe a trial for his love of malice to endure. Here was an opportunity for humbling the girl who had treated him with scorn and ridicule, and the proud man who endured him with but half concealed impatience. Victor Viennet should give up the woman he loved, and only buy a promise of continued silence at a heavy price. The girl should lose her lover; in any case he promised himself that. If Victor refused to give her up, a whisper in his ear of what he knew of her secret, would damp his ardor and bring pride to weigh down the balance as he wished. And her pride, if even Victor's infatuation led him to prefer exposure and disgrace to separation, would never suffer her to marry a man, who, from the first she had never loved, now stripped of his name and honor. In any event that was secure to him. But he had overreached his aim when he drove Victor to resolve on such a sudden departure. Once in Europe, he might lose track of him; his vigilance at such a distance might be eluded, and all but his revenge would be lost; and chance had thrown into his hand the threads of a mystery that only time could unravel, that promised power over more than him; but Victor's absence would ruin all.

Late on the night before his intended departure from Rutledge, a note was handed to him from Dr. Hugh, demanding another interview before he sailed. Victor dared not neglect or refuse the demand. It was too late now to change his plans, and of all things he desired to conceal the fact of his having any private business with Dr. Hugh, from his host and the guests at Rutledge. Gnashing his teeth at the humiliation of feeling himself at the beck and call of this low villain, and cursing the fate that forced him to stoop to such stratagems, he hastily returned a few lines to the doctor, appointing to meet him the following day at noon, at Brandon, the next station to Rutledge, distant about twelve miles, intending to send his baggage on in the train in which he should start, and remaining an hour at Brandon with the doctor, should go on himself in the next train. By this, he would avoid suspicion and meet the persecutor on neutral ground. He found no difficulty in leaving the cars unobserved, and repairing to the inn he had appointed for rendezvous.

The bar-room was crowded with passengers for the cars going west, so, an unnoticed guest, he awaited with growing impatience the keeping of his appointment. Half suspecting that the man's object was to keep him back, and make him lose the train, his impatience and vexation knew no bounds, as the hour slowly waned and no one appeared. The train came rushing through the town, paused a moment, and rushed on, and his last chance for that day had passed. For one moment he had resolved to defy his persecutor, and escape him once and forever; but he knew that before another sunset his secret would be published, and what was this vexation to that ruin? As the crowd hurried from the tavern to the ears, a horseman had alighted at the door, and Victor shrunk back with a guilty feeling of humiliation and fear as he recognized Mr. Rutledge. What a degrading bondage was this for a man of honor—what a damnable humiliation! To be skulking away from the man whom, a few hours ago, he had met as his host and his equal. To be waiting submissively the pleasure of a low villain, whose greedy cunning and mean rascality marked him below the revenge of a gentleman.

"It shall end," muttered Victor, between his teeth, as he screened himself from the sight of the new comer, who had entered the bar-room. He was engaged for several minutes in conversation with the bar-keeper, left a message for a neighboring workman, paid a bill for the cartage of some timber, and was about leaving the room, when his eye fell upon a note that was lying on a table near the door; and Victor's dark cheek mantled with shame and vexation, as, taking it up, Mr. Rutledge read, in a tone of surprise:

"Mr. Victor Viennet. To be left at the Brandon Shades."

"When was this brought here?" he inquired of the man behind the bar.

"This morning, sir, I think," he returned. "A man from your village came with it—a dark, thick-set fellow, if I'm not mistaken; one of the hands from the factory."