My friend, rather to aid my observation than to give a reason for his call, had been speaking slowly to the object of my attention, until becoming satisfied from my manner that I was prepared to answer his question, he quietly dismissed him, and turned toward me again with the same affected composure in his movements, but with an eye full of eager inquiry.
“Eagleton,” said I, “if I am right, a greater change has passed over that face in five years than death itself could have produced. But you have made a request, and I comply with it. I believe, before God, that the person I have just seen is the same to whose description you have just been listening. That description does not now apply, and yet it is a true one. I have doubted my conclusion, and distrusted memory, but I cannot relieve myself of the conviction I have expressed.”
He was evidently prepared for the answer, and did not seem shocked or surprised, though the shade of gloom increased upon his countenance. He rose again, and paced the floor so long that I became impatient.
“I need not tell you,” said he, at last resuming his seat once more, “that what you have seen, and what you are about to hear, are in the deepest confidence. I do not ask your pledge to keep it, but I leave it to your honor till I am dead. You have not only become acquainted, by accident, with family troubles which I hoped until to-day would die with those connected with them, but by that same accident have been enabled to tell me that of which I did not know before, but which, now that I have heard it, solves many doubts, and explains facts before inexplicable. I am composed, but the answer to my question, for the candor of which I thank you, has pained me excessively; and yet, when you have listened to what I have to say, you will doubtless wonder at my sensibility upon such a subject as much as you now wonder at my indifference to your announcement.
“The young man you have just seen is George Ellis. My sister is his wife. Until your visit to-day, however much I may have suspected, no words brought to my ear had ever certainly fastened crime upon, or tainted his name with any thing but vice and dissipation, in which I know he has been deeply steeped. To-day you have added that stain to his character. But why should I fret over what cannot be recalled. I have one real consolation. My sister has never known this new degradation, and will die in ignorance of your disclosures. As to Ellis, he is past feeling. You have seen his situation. But I must proceed with my narrative.”
I do not tell the tale in Eagleton’s words. In spite of all his efforts to control his feelings, they occasionally broke out in exclamations of deep pathos and bitter invective, and led him wandering off from the direct thread of his story. Besides, I subsequently learned many facts which neither of us knew at that time, but which were closely interwoven with the scenes through which I am about to carry the reader.
The father of George Ellis and the father of my friend were once partners in mercantile business, in a thriving town of the West. The firm was Ellis & Eagleton. It did a large business, was widely known and much respected. Mr. Ellis was a man of information and integrity, but a free liver and a man of the world. He never married. He had, however, this son, whom he seemed to love more warmly because there was a stigma upon his birth, or, perhaps, because its history was connected with associations that were painful. But whatever was the reason for his father’s blind attachment, George was humored and indulged, until, even while a child, he became the pest and terror of the neighborhood.
It is said that the offspring of illicit passion are generally marked by insanity of character. Be that as it may, it matters not here. There was enough to account for the worst traits of his disposition, in the unbridled license of his early training, and the foolish devotion of a worldly father. If ever there was an evil spirit in human shape, that spirit was George Ellis. From the very cradle the fiend showed itself. Boys of his own age fled from him as if he had been a wild beast. Eagleton, though older, was afraid of him. No one could govern him, least of all his own parent; and his reputation for mad freaks and reckless mischief soon spread far and wide, and rapidly increased as he became older. And yet with all this, with that dark, bad eye and bold air, he was as handsome a fellow as ever grew to be a man.
His father died when he was about eighteen. He died utterly bankrupt. With scrupulous honor, however, even in the excesses which had led to such a result, he had not involved his firm. On his deathbed he sent for Mr. Eagleton, told him that he died without a dollar to leave behind him, and with an earnestness which, perhaps, at such a moment, could not have been refused, committed his son to his partner’s care.
It was a terrible legacy from a ruined man. My friend’s father might have known that Mr. Ellis’s wish could not be complied with, and that it would be absolutely impossible for him to assume such a trust. It would have been happy for him if he could have felt so. It would have saved him much affliction, and have given to his life happy years that sorrow soon cut off. But the destiny was otherwise.