I never saw Mary Eagleton. I know, however, that, at the time of which I speak, she was the belle of her village, the pet and pride of her father and brother. At the date of my interview with Henry in a distant city, she was a mere shadow of what she had once been—a wreck in mind and body—oppressed with pain and increasing infirmities. These were all portions of that same fearful legacy.
Before the death of Mr. Ellis she had often seen his son. She was about his age, and had been attracted by his appearance. This was all. He was deemed a dangerous acquaintance, and a close and watchful care prevented intimacy. Now, by the last prayer of a dying parent, the profligate was brought to her very door, and sat at her very table and fireside. Her father might have prevented this, and yet have fulfilled his duty to the dead. He was blind.
They soon understood each other. But their conduct was cautious and baffled a watchfulness that was keenly awake. I need not clog my narrative with details. Her brother was away; her father could not be always near her. George was depraved and heartless, she was young and foolish. A private marriage terminated their intercourse, for the heart broken father cast the bridegroom off, at once, sternly, and forever. His wife never saw him again until, years after, in a distant city, he was brought to her bedside—an idiot. The bequest was not yet exhausted. But it might have been worse.
Ellis soon after went to sea in a merchant vessel bound for a foreign port. He was too abandoned even for such a society. On the first arrival of the ship at her destination he was set on shore. Without money, or character, yet with enough shrewdness to keep him from starving, he plunged desperately into all the temptations of a depraved city. Vice and poverty soon led to crime. It was not many months before he concealed himself, a fugitive from justice, on board of a vessel bound for his own country, and with a companion in his guilt, a Spaniard, arrived in the United States but a few days before the meeting mentioned in my friend’s letter.
A few hours after that meeting he and his companion were on their way westward. Ellis hoped to be received again. The Spaniard had nothing to lose, and some adventure in a new country might turn to his advantage. But hard want pressed them sorely. Begging was a slow and servile support. Labor was not so much as thought of. To such minds an answer to the fearful questionings of hunger was not doubtful, or long delayed. Their first adventure was the crime at ——. As Ellis turned over the letters which they had scattered in the road his eye was attracted by the address of one of them. He opened it, read it, and quietly put it in his pocket. It proved, as we have seen, the means of their arrest.
The Spaniard’s name was Antonio. I never heard any other. He was more mature than Ellis in years and in depravity. But the most striking trait of his character was one that will appear hereafter. From the moment of their arrest the prisoners preserved a dogged silence. Antonio could not speak a word of English. Ellis had his own reason for the course he pursued. The driver of the mail, whose person they had treated so unceremoniously, and who, upon their first capture, had been loud in his confidence of their identity with those who had bound him, a few days after declared that his first impressions were hasty, and declined backing his assertion by an oath. The mail which they had robbed had afforded them nothing worth having, and, at the time of their seizure, they had about them no evidence of guilt. The only grounds of suspicion against them were the fact that they were strangers; the letter found near them; their seeming alarm upon seeing the officers; their dogged and persevering silence, and their reckless and abandoned appearance.
The prisoners were confined in separate cells. The officers, who have always motives for industry appealing to them in such cases, saw, at a glance, which was the oldest and most hardened offender, and from which of them they were most likely to gain their object. Ellis was wary and knew their game, but he was without honor, and intensely selfish. His sullenness at last relaxed. He gave them, cautiously, to understand that he would convict Antonio to secure his own escape, and it was determined to use him as a witness against his accomplice.
I need not give the details of the trial. Ellis appeared in the box and gave evidence, coolly, against the accused. The Spaniard was too much a stranger to the form of the proceeding to understand the scheme at once. But light at last broke in upon him and revealed the treachery. From that moment one burning dream, overcoming all fear of punishment, and strangely composing the bitterness of solitude rested upon him. It was a delirious prayer for revenge, in a heart as malignant as was ever shut from human eye. The witness would have trembled if he could have looked within it.
The evidence was effectual. Antonio was convicted, and received the severest sentence that the law allowed—ten years imprisonment. He was taken to his cell. Ellis went at large.
A copy of Eagleton’s letter to his father had been re-mailed, several weeks after the arrest, by some person to whose hand it had come, more considerate than those who had first held it. At the foot a brief explanation was given of the circumstances which rendered it necessary to retain the original, and an apology for the delay in communicating its contents. When it reached its destination Mr. Eagleton was laboring under a second and more serious attack of the same illness which the letter mentioned. It had been brought about by mental suffering, and, so alarming were the symptoms, that his daughter had just despatched a letter to hasten her brother home.