Chapter II: Part 2

"It is quite a story. I was off on a tour through India and Egypt, with my college chum, my dear old Arthur Hughes. Neither of us had any notion of returning home, and we were in the middle of the best time two fellows ever had on this earth, when I had a queer sort of warning. We were both curled up on the window-sill of my room, in our hotel at Cairo, one hot night, sleepless, and enjoying a smoke. Suddenly, above the street, among the shadows and spangled points of all those near domes and pinnacles, I saw what I thought was our national flag, hanging, hardly stirring. It seemed to spring up out of nothing, in its familiar, varied colors, to startle my eye. Then, in a moment, I perceived that it was no flag, but a living spirit, a genius, a guardian angel, whatever you like to call it, which bore the oddest resemblance to one. There before me was the dreamiest figure; a tall beautiful young woman in a helmet, the moon shining on the little spike of it. A long blue veil, bluer than the atmosphere, covered her face, and was blown about her shoulders, not so heavy of texture but that the jewels in her flowing hair flashed through it with wonderful lustres; and her garment fell away in long alternate whites and reds, like the liquid bars we sometimes see flushing and paling in our own sky in the north, when the aurora borealis comes in the March evenings. There she floated many minutes before fading away; and once she raised her veil and beckoned, and her eyes dwelt on me so imploringly that they have become more real to me than anything else in my life. I tell you it shook my heart.... Miss Carter, if you will allow me, I must say that the vision was like, was very like,"--the Sergeant choked a little,--"like you. When I first saw you, I was so startled, it gave me, well, almost a swoon. That is a novel word, and ludicrous, perhaps, but I can use no other. At any rate, the resemblance has drawn me towards you, I can't say how strongly or how much. Please forgive me." For Cecily's wild-rose face was warm.

"I had forgotten all about Arthur. But when I turned to clutch him in my excitement, my first glance told me that he had not seen the phantom, and that he would deride my faith in it. So I tried to laugh off my sudden attack of second-sight; but it was of no use. I dropped into silence when it was my turn to speak, and abandoning presently the effort to seem indifferent, I parted from him, and went to bed.

"It was the only ghostly thing that had ever happened to me, and it impressed me tremendously. For my part, I could get no rest by day or night; that influence was over me like a bad star. I racked my brain to explain it by natural agencies, and it only set me thinking the more of our blessed country being in some terrible trouble. When I came to that, I jumped up and started for the bath, to cool off, and then changed my mind, and struck first for the ticket-office. Whom should I knock into on the way but old Arthur in his fez, fierce as a lion. 'Bob,' he said, dragging me into a booth, 'it's war, war! President Lincoln is calling for men, and I'm going home to spite the devil.' 'There's no choice. I am going home anyhow,' I said. 'What news is there?'

"The little which had travelled that far, I heard from him. Sumter was being fired upon, on the 11th of April, 1861, when I saw Our Lady of the Union. I call her that; but I never spoke of her to Arthur, or to any one. Before June set in we arrived in New York, and we volunteered. Arthur has distinguished himself right and left. He is in Andersonville now, dear fellow. I should hate to end there."

"A martyr is a martyr; the place matters nothing," the girl replied.

"I know," he said; "I did not mean to speak lightly; but I am one of those who cannot always avoid it when they feel much."

The Sergeant's cheeks were burning too, and he quickened his pace. Cecily did not speak, following the bounding bay. But a loneliness which she could not define came upon her; a resentment of the sacred ideal which could yet be to her friend his divinity, his beauty, his bride, in a world from which she was shut out as an irrelevance. And almost as soon, she questioned herself whether because of a tie dearer than the human, this golden-hearted Robert must lose, she in him must lose--what? For answer, the noble and foolish tears welled up from the depths, and fell into the folds across her knee. Her companion drew his own rein, and laid his hand upon Molly's.

"Oh, why do you cry? I can't bear it. What have I done?"

"Nothing."

"I did not intend to disturb you, to make you care about it, or pity me; I am much happier since that happened. Could it be--oh, could it be--" He gazed a moment upon her, absorbedly and absorbingly, and she turned away. For who can make conscious preparation for the imminent? Sudden ever is the finger of Death, to the watchers; sudden also is Love.

They were under the shade of some giant pines. The young man vaulted lightly to the ground, close to Molly's satin stirrupless flank, his hands clasped, his head thrown back, fired with adoring hope. When Cecily inclined towards him again, he saw in her (or was it his bewitched fancy?) the remote, incredible radiance of his old day-dream. The great flush rolled responsive to his own clear brow. He shook himself free, and found his voice. "Cecily," he said simply, "I love you; you must know that I love you. Such a love has no beginning and no end. You understand that and me. Of myself I have nothing to say. You have seen me only among Willoughby's recruits; but I never wished to be elsewhere. Judge of me, as we two are, now and here. Can you, do you think you could be my wife, by and by? Tell me. Tell me!" Then Cecily, simple too, in the same tremor of exaltation, put out her right hand. He caught at it with both his own, and buried his face there. His wide hat had fallen; the warm light was on his clustering hair. With a sweet instinct like motherliness, his maid, bending over, kissed it in benediction.

It was two o'clock when they crossed the ford, and the late afternoon found them still pacing on their roadless way, like the lost enchanted knight and lady of the Black Forest. They were less than a mile from Braleton, on the rocks, in sight of the tents, when they unsaddled and tethered the horses, and made the last halt. "Dearest," the Sergeant had said, lying at her feet, his elbow in the grass, "dedicate my sword." Raising himself, he made a motion as if drawing it, and held it towards her and the sunset; Cecily, in the same pretty pantomime, touched her lips to the viewless blade, priestess of a new investiture. "One thing we both love better than ourselves; is it not so?" She was not jealous now. "These United States, right or wrong!"

"Oh, no!" The soldier sheathed his sacred weapon. "Say justice, liberty, the rights of man; the things our United States ought to stand for." Then the light heart in him laughed; and Concrete and Abstract blessed each other. Happy and silent, they lingered on the brow of the pine copse; a breeze sprang up; vast and gorgeous sky-colors spread and deepened. The Sergeant's uplifted face was fixed upon his betrothed. She seemed to dissolve away before him, or before him, rather, to be vivified and set free. Slowly between her and him, transubstantiating her touching beauty, gathered a solemn, changeful, wavering cloud-splendor of ivory, rose, and sapphire, gathered out of the land of myths into recognized and unforgotten fact. For a quarter of an hour he endured that mystical glory; then his head dropped forward on her knees. A thing seen was yet upon him: once more Our Lady of the Union, but with a smile as if of one assured at last of ransom, and ineffably content. When Cecily touched him, wondering, he shuddered, and brushed an imagined film from his eyes. She sat there, innocent of any magic, unaware in what potter's hand her spirit was so much fine clay.

From the depths of the vale the croak of frogs arose, faint here and shriller there, then long-drawn and general: ever a most mournful, homesick, and foreboding sound to our armies in the South. The distant camp seemed ominously quiet; but on the outskirts of it was a dissolving shadow, a moving dark clot, there, a moment back, between them and the scarce-fluttering flag, and still there, now that the flag was hauled down, its bright hues effaced against the more vivid evening air. Presently the group of men, for such it was, scattered. Cecily's keen sight read what was written afar; the familiar figure of the one-armed brisk Lieutenant-Colonel in the saddle coming towards the hill, with others following on the gallop behind.

"You are needed," she said without preamble; "you must go to them." With emphasis and authority, slight and quick, yet irrevocable, she spoke. He turned about, and sprang to his feet from his enchantment at her side; for the divine day, the Sergeant's field-day, was over. "Is this the way of women, or only your way? You send me from you on a supposition, a scruple," he answered, plaintively.

"Go." She repeated it softly, and with closed eyes, lest she should look upon her own heart-break. "It is unnecessary, as you know," he replied; "but if you make it a point of honor, I am glad to obey." He held out his hands, and she took them, cherishing, steadfast, as in a pact. Her voice and step were strangely unsteady; they held up the mirror, as it were, to his. What was there in a commonplace incident to move them so to the depth? In a passionate presentiment, he drew her closer to him. "Are we to be given to each other only that we may be severed, and suffer the more? What if the end should be now? Cecily!"

But the young heroic mettle rose to meet his. "Beloved, you are mine and not mine. You are consecrated for the term of the war; so am I. I will always give you up to your task. Perhaps you may measure by that whether I love you." He looked down with a grateful sigh on her who so mysteriously held him to his sacrifice, and shared it, and through her and in her, on the old, old fate which he knew now was driving him to the cliff.

"If there is to be a fight, I want your flag, the flag you made!" he whispered, grasping at anything to hide this rending in him of the spirit from the flesh. "However, whenever I fall, I want to be buried in it. Is it done? May I take it for mine, before it is presented to the regiment?"

"Yes. You shall carry my colors here and in heaven. I will pray for my knight."

He kissed her once, twice, for the betrothal, and yet again for the farewell.

He took Molly, the fresher animal of the two, and spurred to the open ground below, breaking out from the wood-path, ready for any duty, on time. He looked illumined, detached, transfigured: a Saint Michael to be remembered after by his companions in the moral crises of their lives. The Lieutenant-Colonel drew rein, relieved. "I was wishing for you, of all people," he said; "I feared you were far away. There has been an alarm; we must sleep under arms. The Colonel and most of the officers have not returned. I will go back now. Take these six with you, and cross the railway tracks to Palmer's. It is a rough road, and a long journey; but report as soon as you can." The Sergeant started with his bayoneted cavalcade in a dash westward. Cecily, apprehensive of something unusual, saw the slow-rising dust, and, ahead of it, the erect leader, scaling the horizon, and vanishing into the yet glowing sky. A pang unutterable tore her; but, uttered, it would have been none other than _Amen_.

Poor Saladin was tired enough, having been out all day long; and Cecily led him carefully to the plain. Every clapping leaf, every crackling twig underfoot, struck a chill into her bosom, on the over-shadowing hill-slopes. She had played too brave a part under her mental turmoil, and in the presence of her lover, himself too easily enamoured of death. A spell greater than any he had felt was over her, breathing a blackness between her and the light. Now her ample courage was fast giving out. She saw a face in the thicket, and was barely able to nerve herself not to scream. A man, in a military dress she did not know, came forward, and raised his cap. It was Major Julian Brale, free at last to do some scouting over his ancestral acres, alone, and with hot revenges in his heart. He was sorry for her, and angry at her discovery. He apologized briefly, and helped her to mount, not without concern, but with a scornful coldness of manner which he could not help. When she had gone, he returned to the bushes, cursing the Eleventh; for he had recognized the saddle on the bay. The two forces were on the brink of battle; but he was not an expert sharp-shooter for nothing, and if he could but get sight of that thief, that coward, that hell-born villain who had taken his old father's precious Molly from him-- A moonbeam straggled in where he bent over, priming his rifle, and he moved from it into the dark.

Dinnerless, supperless, much too overwrought to go to bed, Cecily Carter sat in the Colonel's empty tent. For company, she had shaken out her great silken banner over the lounge, where the firelight, falling on it, seemed to praise its divine destroying loveliness with a poet's Pentecostal tongue. Once she murmured prayerfully: "Dear Robert, dear Robert." Something not herself had bade him go, and he was gone; there was all of herself now in these fears. The little parting from him which she was enduring became magnified and abiding, so that she looked upon him slain, and thought with a sort of joyous satisfaction how under the buttons of his old blue jacket, where nobody, not even his mother, knew of them, were rose-leaves all about the open wound next his heart; rose-leaves pressed most fervently, one by one, to her lips, and laid there. Other caress she could not give him; though she was his, he was the Republic's, for ever and ever. Again, she saw him carried on a howitzer to a green lonely place. A stone reared itself before her, and she read upon it an odd inscription: _If ye seek the summit of true honor, hasten with all speed into that heavenly country._ She started up. Was her brain indeed giving way? Who had spoken? Where had she heard those words? How piercing a beauty they had! Were they in the Church ritual? What did they mean? Why should they hound her from her rest?

The Colonel's little ormolu clock struck eleven. Almost on the stroke, the delayed revellers entered. Adela could not fail to notice her sister's nervousness, but attributed it to anxiety for herself. The Sultana of the Surgeon's christening had been prodigally feasted and flattered; she had come home with an armful of hothouse flowers, effulgent with gratification, and in a talking mood. The Colonel's boy brought in the lamps. When the Colonel himself followed, grown grim with the sudden tension and commotion about, his remark was to the point. "I'm afraid you women will have to get out of camp, quick. I smell powder. It is likely to be damned disagreeable." His handsome, worldly wife, coming, butterfly-like, in yellow, out of her dark wrappings, fixed him with her censorious eye. "James Willoughby! You have been drinking." He was wont, on such occasions, to cast a comical appealing glance at Cecily, of whom he was fond. She did not smile in return, and her pallor touched him; so that he went over to her at once. "What's the matter, child?" he asked, with affectionate anxiety. But an approaching clang and clatter, and the challenge of the sentry without, took from him what he meant to say; he left Cecily to her sister, and hurried into the air. His going added to her trouble; and yet she would have had no solace in keeping a friend near. Oh, the stress and strain of dull daily incident upon that inner universe, frangible as a bubble, where she and Robert had begun to live!--she and Robert, and the Love of Country alone, for between this and them must be union everlasting. Oh, the tyranny of all that is, laid upon him, faithful in his place; upon her, faithful in hers; the speechless dealings of lonely lovers with the Lone!

Private Cobbe, being foremost, saluted breathlessly: "Colonel, the pickets are being driven in; the enemy is advancing." The gallant fellow pressed his hand to his thigh; he was wounded, and he was soldier enough to feel that wound an ignominy which had been received obscurely, and elsewhere than on the field. Immediately, all along the tents, arose the multitudinous yet unconfused cries of "Form!" and "Fall in!" from the captains; the flapping guidons were borne hither and thither to their places, and the thousand horses, wheeling on their dancing hoofs by the gleam of lantern and torch under the watery moon, began to make huge, fantastic shadows along the old parade-ground. The Colonel, drawing on his gauntlets, and still afoot, noticed for the first time that Cobbe and McGrath held between them, each with an arm around him, an officer. For an instant, in the imperfect light, he thought him some prisoner, until he recognized, in a flash, Molly with her great liquid, excited eyes, Molly with her even mane hanging wet and limp, confronting him. Private McGrath had held in until now. He blurted: "I'm afraid he's gone, sir." The Colonel took a step forward, as if it were into eternity. The Surgeon, standing by, echoed after him: "My God!"

They lifted their friend down together, and carried him in, and laid him with extreme gentleness where by chance the new flag, a kingly winding-sheet, was above him and under. The Surgeon bent very low for a while over the lounge. The many in the tent, used to calamity less great than the loss of their best, held their breath; the Adjutant's dog, close to his master's legs, lifted his long gray throat and crooned softly and mournfully, as the band outside, far down the disparting columns, broke into a loud, thrilling strain, impatient for victory. The Sergeant was dead, with a ball in his breast. No one moved until Cecily groaned and dropped.

AN EVENT ON THE RIVER.

MORNING lay over Portsmouth and her great stretches of opaline sea. The little islands, north to the Maine shore, and east to the harbor-buoys, were ablaze with red and yellow bushes to the water-brink; the low-masted gunlows were beating out like a flock of dingy gulls; and from afar, pleasantly, musically, sounded the bugle at the Navy Yard. The Honorable Langdon Openshaw, standing among ruinous warehouses and wharves, built by the Sheafes in the hour of their commercial glory under the second George, looked down upon the clear Piscataqua at full flood, breathing between its day-long, Samson-like tugs at the yet enduring piers. It was a lonely spot; the wind had a way there, sometimes, of waking momentary, half-imagined odors, the ghosts of the cargoes of wines and spices in the prodigal past. His own solitude, the washing tide, the one towering linden yonder, the gambrel roofs and ancient gardens, the felt neighborhood of the dear wild little graveyard where his forbears slept, steeped his heart in overwhelming melancholy. He had already passed a week at the Rockingham. It was a strange date to choose, out of all his free and prosperous life, for a first visit since childhood to the fair old New England borough where he was born. A sort of morbid home-sickness had driven him back now, in his distresses, to her knee. For the Honorable Langdon Openshaw, innocent of the astounding crime with which he was charged, was out on bail.

The accusation was the most inexplicable of things. His chief characteristic had been an endearing gentleness, which brought him the popular favor he cared nothing for. He was the captain citizen of his town; he had held, in turn, every office public esteem could give him; he was president of a wealthy corporation which controlled a bank. It was this treasury which he was said to have rifled, and its cashier whom he was said to have murdered. No living creature was there in all Connecticut but laughed aloud when the report began to spread; but time and circumstantial proof sobered them, and increased the breed of cynics and sceptics the country over. The philanthropist, the good man, the Sunday-school paragon, forsooth, once again exposed in all his gangrened sanctity! Two sickening circumstances, in the dark designs of Providence, pointed at him with deadly finger. One was, that at the time of the robbery, there was an impending crash in his vested finances, since wholly and finally averted by his foresight and skill; the other, that sometime before, in the discharge of duty, he had incurred the enmity of the victim. Was it not possible, during Mr. Openshaw's interval of anxiety, he, that is, any other than he, might have dared retrieve his fortune, and silence the witness of his crime, George Wheeling, found unexpectedly at his desk at midnight over his accounts, and thrown down the stair into the vaults? But there was a more certain and horrible evidence. He had been seen escaping; he had been recognized. The scuffle had roused the occupants of houses near; and these, looking forth by the city lamplight, saw the flying figures, one of them, alas, inconceivably, yet unmistakably, so help us God! the Honorable Langdon Openshaw. Had they not a perfect unanimous knowledge, for many years, of his face, his unique gait, his uncommon stature? Where was there another such odd and definite physical personality? As to the confederates, well, there were reasons, no doubt, why bravos should be hired.

Wearily, wearily, he parted his gaze from the alluring eternity in the river, and strolled a little distance to the warm wall, and sat down in the late September grasses against it, like the broken man he was. He took off his hat, a characteristic dark soft felt such as he always wore, and the air was good upon his brow. His thoughts reverted to old times. He had no kindred except a sister living in Santa Barbara with her family of daughters, and between them there had never been any marked natural affection. The distant cousin of his own whom he had married, had borne him no children, and she was dead: a gentle, negative soul, to whom he confided little of what touched him most. He had formed no intimate companionships. No one save his mother, whom he lost in his boyhood, and whose maiden name he bore, had ever possessed much influence over him. He was a man's man, as the saying is, hitherto of any age he chose, and rich in all resources. But he had strong dormant affections, shamefacedly expended on public orphanages and hospitals, and on the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; and he felt rightly that he could have been fatherly, brotherly, even filial, with a son. Ah, if he but had a son! Bulwarked about with modern conveniences, that, his one necessary, he had missed. And here, in strange opprobrium, was the end of his career and of his name. "Lover and friend hast Thou put far from me!" he breathed to himself, feeling, for the first time since his calamity, a profound submission of the soul.

He heard voices in the windless air. He did not rise, for they were not approaching him. He could not help distinguishing the animated words.

"This is as far as I ought to go. I guess I'll say good-bye."

"They will miss you notta yet. Oh, please do, please do stay! I starve if I am absent. Come, one kissa more."

"No; wait till to-morrow, you great baby. Go away now, and do your best to be good."

"Alla righta; if you give to me one little song."

"Truly?"

"Truly, Anita mia. I desire indeed, this hour, the mandolin. But no matter: sing. All is quiet: see! it can begin."

Then the girl's thin bird-like voice soared alone, not in any expected love-lyric of the seaport streets, but in a Christian folk-song of artless beauty.

"All in the April evening,
April airs were abroad;
The sheep with their little lambs
Passed me by on the road.

"The sheep with their little lambs
Passed me by on the road:
All in the April evening
I thought on the Lamb of God.

"The lambs were weary, and crying
With a weak human cry:
I thought on the Lamb of God
Going meekly to die.

"Up in the blue, blue mountains,
Dewy pastures are sweet,
With rest for the little bodies,
And rest for the little feet.

"But for the Lamb of God,
Up on the hill-top green,
Only a Cross of shame,
Two stark crosses between!

"All in the April evening,
April airs were abroad;
I saw the sheep with their lambs:
I thought on the Lamb of God."[1]

There was a pause after. Then Openshaw sighed. He knew they were in each other's arms, the morning heaven blessing them; but with him it was spiritual darkness, and bitter evenfall. A boat passed below, the oarsmen curious; and the young loiterers on the old wharf stood apart.

"My angel, my sainta!"

"Hush! It is twelve already; I must be off."

"Ah, the time is so short! Cruel!"

"Dear, you are nicest when you are good."

"Behold, I am."

At last the farewells and vacancy; and then footsteps making towards the angle of the wall. Mr. Openshaw's stately head, crowned with the abundant glossy black and gray which gave it such distinction in a land of bald pates, arose upon the surprised view of the new-comer. He, on his part, with no question as to a gentleman's supposed midday slumbers, stooped, and offered Mr. Openshaw his hat. The two, confronted, smiled a little; both tall, aquiline, clean-shaven.

"I thank you. Perhaps you would rather have me say, _molte grazie_. You are an Italian, are you not?"

The other, wonderingly, but with native grace, assented. "I am a Florentine." How he said it! Where did he get that gypsy princeliness, his clear pallor, the nameless magic that takes the heart?

"You speak English fairly."

"I have been in youra country long."

"And I in yours, many years ago." Now Openshaw was dallying, and consciously. What impelled him to open sociabilities with such an one, he did not know. This stripling of another grade reminded him dimly of something, and teased his eye. "What a bearing the fellow has!" he thought again. Having snapped every tie with his own life, he could afford to be interested in that of others. He took pleasure in the diverting accent and idiom, and the abandon with which the loose, rough clothes were worn.

"Florence is the most beautiful of cities. You ought almost to go back." It relieved his heart somehow, the foolish commonplace, as might the colloquy about the weather among aristocrats in the tumbrils of the French Revolution. All time hung a mortal weight upon his hands; nor did the un-Americanized stranger seem to be in a hurry. But now he started a little.

"Go back? Santa Maria! I suffer: I go back so soona that I can!" As he spoke, with the soft round harp-like Tuscan tone which the east wind of New England had not rasped, he glanced around apprehensively. "With money, nexta month, I sail on the sea, and I arrive."

"Well, that might be worse," said the elder man, indulgently. "May I ask your name?"

"Ralph Power."

"Ralph Power? That is not an Italian name."

"Sir, I know. My mother, she have the marriage name Potenza. Rodolfo, that is mine. I translate the two, and that is Ralph Power, whicha make it easy for the tongue of many."

Mr. Openshaw had drawn his hand over his eyelids, as if feeling the sting of memory.

"What do you do for a living here?"

"I serva the market. Once I assist to builda boats for the Capitan, but now he work no more; the beautiful Anne, she is his daughter. Ah, signor!" Ingenuously, boyishly, he sighed.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-two."

"How many questions I have asked you! I am afraid I have kept you from your duties. Pray go now."

The other bowed, and turned townwards. But Openshaw felt on the instant a sort of loneliness. "Rodolfo!" he exclaimed, "do me the favor to spend this." He slipped a coin into an uninviting hand, partly, as he would have said himself, from natural depravity, partly, from the sheer luxury of his own incognito, and that of giving away to a young man what no young man could inherit. "It may help you out of your trouble. Trouble is very hard to bear, sometimes."

If he were aware of expecting anything in return, from a poor Italian, it was the usual ecstatic thankful benediction of poor Italians in like luck. Once he had lived among them on their own soil; he knew the simple-hearted, engaging, vagabond breed through and through. But this specimen of it flushed and scowled, while trying to seem courteous; and his would-be benefactor was puzzled. As they stood opposite, they were of equal height; for the younger had drawn himself up a good inch.

"I am afraid you are proud. You have picked that up in New England."

Rodolfo answered resentfully: "Sir, I have the blood of New England also, and it is for me the destiny to earn my money, most of all after what I promise to the beautiful Anne."

As he said it, warming thus into his very self, the eyes of Openshaw, watching him, were dazzled, as one may be who crosses an alcove towards a door in plain sight, and finds that seeming door a mirror. A little alarum-bell rang in his brain. He shuddered, for all the forces within him were rallying together: triumph, hate, revenge, deadly delight; things he had not known were possible to him swarmed into his spirit with a clang. He recognized, at a stroke, that this vagrant youth, this common workman, looking at him with no smile now, bore a violent resemblance to himself. He searched for details, lightning-quick, and devouringly. Yes! there were the dark, fine, pendulous hair, the small, close ear, the strong nose and jaw, even the large, slender hand toil had hardly scarred, the back of it smooth and hard as veined marble; how like the Openshaw hand, plain in the old Lely portrait, plainer yet in the Stuarts, on the melancholy walls of his own home! And what followed? The voice, significant, prophetic, of the demon of self-preservation in his ear: "This may be the man who killed George Wheeling. This must be the man. Impeach him; clear yourself!" Openshaw, in his calmer mood, a few moments back, had measured the character before him. Whatever else it was, it was not astute. He foresaw no trouble in worming the secret out of him.

"Very well," he replied, as if æons on æons of thought had not passed since he spoke last. "I will take the gold-piece back, on your own condition: I will see that you earn it. Have you business on hand?"

"Oh, no. The venerable butcher, the fever kills him; we bury him, and locka the door for all day." Rodolfo was sullen yet.

"Then, will you kindly go into the square, buy me cheese, pilot bread, two quart bottles of Sauterne, and two glasses, and return by way of Daniels Street? I shall be waiting at the landing. I should like to hire a boat for an hour, and have you row me up river. Will you do so?"

The lad hesitated. Finally, touched, or put upon his mettle by a seeming confidence, he set out, with the greenback in his pocket which Mr. Openshaw had given him. The latter, at this pause in their colloquy, was made aware that he was suffering keenly. He had exceeding self-control; his successes in life had sprung from it. But every mastered nerve in his body, having already undergone so much, and having so much to undergo, was humming like a beehive. He could not stand still. He wandered about, meeting few pedestrians, across Water Street, up Manning Street to Puddle Dock with its liberty pole, and again past the graveyard, lingering wherever he could command a view of the broad glorious anchorage, tragic with the exposed ribs of rotting ships. Into the happier neighborhoods near, he would not penetrate; this one had been happy too, when he was a child. There he saw but visions of greatness gone, of comfort broken, and an hour ago, could have laid his cheek to the old flaggings, and wept. But he had now a terrible just purpose, and for that he must save his strength.

He was at the landing later than Rodolfo, who sat in a white wherry ballasted with his purchases, the oars already in hand. Openshaw rested his cane on the gunwale, and stepped quietly into the stern; they backed out of the cramped spaces, and shot away. The surface of the harbor was dimpling, little by little, with the great hidden swirls of the turning tide; deceptively glassy between its deflected banks, it gleamed like the thin ice which forms in November, and over which boys send pebble after pebble, and laugh to hear them chirruping. But Rodolfo had learned long since how to cajole the fierce Piscataqua; and tacking artfully by St. John's Point, he labored through the end arch of the great bridge, and gained the blue highway beyond. A train thundered overhead. Two women in the footpath, leaning over the rail, stared fixedly at the little boat, and from one sensitive face to the other, and again at their contrasted attire. They were Rodolfo's neighbors, and pleased that he had fallen in with a gentleman.

The cruisers were not back within the hour, nor within three hours. The whole world was to change strangely for them both, meanwhile. The order of what Langdon Openshaw had intended to say and do came to naught, because what happens to happen is lord over the strongest human will. He had prepared his cunning questionings, as if to force his own fate, forgetting that the aggregation of outer circumstance which we call fate is itself an irresistible vortex; the trapper, and not the trapped. Up stream, by Frank's Fort, under a sapphire sky, while as yet little had been said, he found that his watch had run down, and he asked for the correct time. Rodolfo set him right from a cheap timepiece. As he handled it, there appeared, linked to the guard, an artistic bit of bronze, a tiny Renaissance figure, with bow and hound, the blown draperies minutely fair. Openshaw saw it, and the whole universe was not so manifest to him as that small ominous curio within it.

"The Diana! On your soul, where, how, did you get that?" It was familiar to him; he knew it, though he had not seen it for more than a score of years. The rower dropped it back into his breast, definitely.

"It is mine, and dear to me. My mother who gave it, she is dead."

"Did you say your mother's name was Potenza? Was it Agata Potenza? Agata Boldoni once?"

"Yes."

There was a thronging pause.

"When did she die?"

"It was sixa years ago; I proceed to America."

"Have you brothers and sisters?"

"I have, in Italy, twin brothers, older; their lame-a father, Niccola Potenza, live with them. But he is notta mine."

Quick, loud, sure, the queries and the answers fell, like the hammer-strokes of a coffin in the making.

"Your father was--?"

"How can I know? They tell me he was vera handsome, vera rich, and from this America. _Malfattore!_ He steal away, and I am born after; and she see him not in her life, I see him not in mine."

The crew had apparently hurt the passenger, for the latter heaved against the thwarts.

"Once more. Was your mother ever married to your father?"

Rodolfo knit his brows, and set his teeth. "No."

For a long, long time there was no sound but the little singing keel on its joyous flight, and Openshaw's head was hidden in his hands. Rodolfo, of his own vigorous accord, took the way of Dover Bridge, across the noble inland bay, and branched up the shallowing Oyster. There by the bank, in the stiller solitudes, he shipped his oars, and, reaching forth, touched the bowed shoulder, not without compassion.

"_Illustrissimo_, look up! Tell me." Then did Openshaw begin, steadily, but hardly above his breath, intent the while on the image of his own youth before him, as if from that only he might draw courage to confess.

"I have a dear friend who, when he was no older than you are now, went to Italy. He spent his best years in a delusion, for he thought then he might become a great painter. His character, such as it was and is, turned to the things of good report; he was an orphan, with a competence; but he had had no home, and no moral training. Being something of a recluse, he developed late and slowly. At a time when the storm-clouds in most young men's lives are lifting, his were surcharging themselves, and getting ready to burst. On his thirtieth birthday, in Ferrara, he--"

"In Ferrara, yes!" broke the eager interruption.

"He persuaded another man's wife to run away with him. She was a peasant, very young and innocent, with a sweet pensive Perugino face; she had been his model, up to her marriage with Niccola Potenza."

There was a sharp affirmative breath from the listener.

"Niccola Potenza was a cooper, with good prospects. He was considered quite a match for the girl; but he turned out to be dull, silent, and preoccupied. Little Agata was romantic; and her thoughts ran easily back to my friend. The fault was, assuredly, all his. He thought that he loved her, and so, indeed, he did; although he loved better, alas, the adventure and the rebellion. At any rate, he took her away boldly from her husband and her babes, and set up life in his old studio, in Florence. The cooper, sworn to revenge himself, had nearly hunted my friend down, when on Easter Day he fell from a crowded and festooned inn-balcony, and broke his thigh. Somehow, after that, his fury failed him; and he sank, under his misfortune, into a sort of apathy. Things went wrong also with the lovers. Agata kept only for a while her soft, joyous, docile ways, and then grew restless and wretched, with the canker of a good heart spoiled, which nothing on earth can cure. She would spend hours in the chapel near by, her face covered, thinking and weeping; and then she would go back to her little household tasks, and move about in my friend's sight, her pale penitent face driving him wild more effectually than any audible reproach could have done. Of course he saw what was in her soul: the struggle between her foolish passion for him, and mortal home-sickness for the inner peace which had attended her old honorable life. He, on his part, resented the moral awakening in her, and stamped down both her conscience and his own. Against the voice within which bade him, since he had done her an irretrievable wrong, to take the legal burden of it upon himself, and make her his wife in America, arose his tyrannous social cowardice. He dared not; he had a depraved but intelligent dread of discord and incongruities. And so, as many another man as weak has done, he served his æsthetic sense, and threw honor to the winds. He was never, I think, wilfully unkind to Agata; his selfishness would seem to me now less diabolic had he tried to estrange her from him. But as soon as their first apprehensive year together had passed, without any talk on the subject, he left her. Before he took his train, that night in May, my friend drew up a paper for poor Agata's maintenance. The sum was small, but much more than she had been accustomed to call her own. I know he had no forewarning of--of his child; he provided for her alone." Mr. Openshaw was speaking with some difficulty. "When were you born?"

"On the feast of San Stefano, the twenty-sixta of December, eighteen hundred sixta-five."

Rodolfo had been listening under a strain keener than that of physical deafness. The more nervously overwrought of the two at this particular moment, he was likewise the more restrained. A certain question was hot in his throat. Though he had not understood all of Mr. Openshaw's melancholy monologue, he had apprehended the heart of it only too well. But he said nothing further.

A flock of pioneer blackbirds, in delirious chatter, were gathering overhead for their autumn migration, darkening the narrow sky-space with their circling wings. Openshaw looked up.

"Those birds go from pole to pole to find--what? So did he. His youth was killed in him; and before long, nevertheless, he was cheerful and active again, and courted by the world. He came home to his own honest and normal life, and after a while he married. He had no tidings of Agata, and had actually resolved once to try to find her, when he heard what must have been a false report, that she had died; and he did not doubt it, for he used to see her faithful patient little face in all his dreams. From what I have learned of late, I believe that he is most miserable, and near his own end. He does not deserve to hear of her last days. But if by letting me know, you can punish him through me, do not spare him. I will not, I promise you."

Rodolfo sat in the boat, immovable, the thin leaves of the bowery wild-grape flapping overhead, and flickering him with elfin light and shade. "My mother," he began in a low voice, "did the best: the grace of God was in her. Niccola was sick; the trade was gone, and then was mucha poverty. With me in her amiable arms, she return on the feet to Ferrara, and petition him; and, lo! the good cripple man, he pardon. There us four in one family, we flourish. The American money she could notta help, go among all till all are grown; she die of the fever sixa year ago, with many candles and masses for her soul; and because it is notta fit that my brothers spend on me, I ask Niccola's blessing, and come to America. That is the end."

Openshaw inquired presently, when he could do so: "Had you any education, as a child? Can you read and write, Rodolfo?"

"No." He sat sheepishly for a moment, then seized his oars.

"How have you prospered over here? Have you been able to save a little? You spoke of wishing to return."

Rodolfo quivered. "It musta be."

"Why so?" There was genuine tenderness in the two words.

"There is nothing of hope for me. I am in a greata fix. I leave, I go; I cannot stay. I have a sin also. Only my beloved, she know how it was I transgress, so thatta perhaps my guilt is not for eternity."

Openshaw laid the tip of his stick upon the rowlock, with authority. "Do not start yet; let the boat drift. You must be hungry with this long exercise. Pray pass me those things near you, and the wine; and while you lunch, I hope you will be as frank with me, Rodolfo, as I have been with you.... I look upon it as a miracle of mercy that at the eleventh hour we have found each other." He knew that the young man's blazing black eyes were full upon him. "I can help you. Only keep nothing back." He filled one of the glasses from the fizzing bottle, and passed it. But it was struck aside, and the cry that followed was so sincere it gave the rudeness dignity.

"Ah! No, no, no. Sir, I touch the spiritual drink no more till I die. I vow to Anita mia, after the terrible night. For see! The evil ones, companions, take me on a burst in a city notta this, Hartaford, and thieve." His voice dropped under the excitement, like a file of infantry under fire. "They thieve a banka; and I watch, in gin so drunk as Bacco; and when the invisible man arise pugnacious, I throttle him, and curse, and rolla him down to the cellar. He moan and expire, so that we go down to thieva more; but the city she hears, there is a sound, then a sound on top of him, and we fly, fly, fly, this streeta, that streeta, till I come back awake to this Portsmouth, and fall on my knee to Anne, and cry tears. Ah, my sainta! she comfort me in charity, and talk to me, and keepa me from the bad; and for penance I go vera dry always, not to be damn. I tell it not to Niccola at home when I go; and I pray to go soon, that the Statesa Prison notta hanga me."

Such is the equilibrium between the infinite and folly, that at this juncture, as he recalled afterwards, Mr. Openshaw was eating his cheese. He answered, marvelling at his own composure.

"I read about it in the newspapers. You are in great danger, my poor boy. Now listen. There is a ship sailing for Genoa from New York next Saturday; and on her I wish you to engage your passage. That will give you a week to adjust your little affairs here; and you must, moreover, see your excellent sweetheart, and persuade her to marry you and go with you. Will you do that?"

Rodolfo opened his fine eyes very wide, and then closed them. "Oh, voluptuous as it would be, I cannot. The Capitan he make Anne deny me until I shall have many riches. She is a handmaid of domestic service on Pleasanta Street; but the old one, he is proud for her, and with the mosta reason in all the world. I shall coop with thesea my brothers cooping always in Ferrara, and do my parta with my soul. For bye-and-bye we make a marriage; and then she will be content to live in the sympathetic Italy, where safeness is for me."

"But we mean to mend all that, Rodolfo. Your father, whom I know very well, is growing old, and has a great deal of property with no one to share it. The least he can do for you (I am sure he feels that), is to put you out of the reach of want. He will not ruin you, nor throw you into temptations of a kind other than those you have undergone; for you are his son, and as such he must love you. But he will hope to hear by next spring, that you have bought a farm and vineyard, and that your kind kins-people at home, and your wife, sometimes pray for him; yes, and for me. Trust me; we need say no more about it. He will have it all settled by law as soon as he is able, but certainly within a month." He passed his hand over his hair, absently, and resumed. "You will go across the ocean now; and if my friend lives, he may come to you; but he may not live, and he may not come. It is his punishment not so much to lose you, or what you might, after all, be to him, as to recognize that his awful breach of duty has established between you what I may call, perhaps, in the long run, an incompatibility." Poor Openshaw, on the rack of his own candor, groaned aloud.

Once more they were crossing Greenland Bay, and the lone and lovely miles seaward. Rodolfo crept up quietly to his strange benefactor, who was absently gazing far away, so quietly that the wherry moved not a muscle under him.

"It is you," he said. "The 'friend' is a made-up. I know. _Padre, si!_" He threw his arms about Mr. Openshaw, his old hatred melted away, and lay there on his knees like a little boy, sobbing, sobbing. "It is for nothing at all," he explained with his endearing semblance of good-breeding; "but the gentle goodaness of God. The beautiful Anne,--O you musta see her, and letta yourself be thank in so harmonious the voice of seventeen! she will taka me. Behold, I am so vera, vera happy." Quite overcome, he did not even raise his head when he was spoken to.

"Am I forgiven, Rodolfo? Can you forgive me for your poor mother's sake?"

For answer, the lad covered the hand he held with kisses of southern fervor, and pressed into it the little delicate charm from his watch-string.

At the touch of it, the tyranny of yesterday and to-morrow, and all his suffering present and to come, departed from Openshaw. A divine felicity began now to possess him; he was grateful, he was at peace; whatever his retribution was to be, he embraced it, in spirit, like a bride. In his revery, he seemed to stand before the everlasting tribunal, with inscrutable truth on his lips: "Of this that was mine I was heedless. Because of my heedlessness, Poverty and Ignorance and Inferiority and Exile took him by the hand, and led him to the pit. He is rescued from the worst; he will cling to the highest which he sees, with an elected soul to help him; but what he might have been he can never be. It was I that sowed; let it be mine to reap. The indelible blood that is shed is on my hands, not on his. Visit Thy wrath upon me, for here is it due. With body and soul, will, sense, and understanding, from first to last, in every fibre of my being, I affirm me accountable for this thing." To the tribunal on earth, its magnate of unblemished reputation had no explanation to offer. He foresaw only his arraignment, and the words with which to clinch it: "Gentlemen of the jury, I plead guilty."

Rodolfo spoke first. "I am so glad I guess, I guess from the teara in your eye, that time."

The tears welled up again as the other replied: "There is something else you will never guess, thank God."

"No?"

"No, my boy."

Rodolfo looked up, and smiled, without irrelevant curiosity. He was too content, afloat there.

The Honorable Langdon Openshaw took charge of the tiller, the son to whom he had twice given life still at his feet. With neither oar nor sail the guided boat came home from the upper waters to the port, in the mellowing afternoon, borne on the mighty ebb-tide of the Piscataqua.

THE PROVIDER.