The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 62, December, 1862

"Mary's boat was not alone; it had a companion. I thought it was Bernard. I drew near and spoke his name. Doctor Percival answered me.

I do not think that he recognized my voice. He turned around with a startled movement, for I was quite close, and asked, 'Who is it?'

"I did not answer. I turned and fled away into the darkness, across the sands, that answer no footsteps with echoes. It was a comfort to feel that he was out there, between me and the boundless space of sea.

"When I draw near the confines of Hereafter's shore, I think I shall feel the same kind of comfort, if some soul that I knew has gone out just before me; it will cape the boundary-line of 'all-aloneness.'"

Miss Axtell must have forgotten that she was talking to me, as she retraced her steps and thoughts of that night, for, with this thought, she seemed to "wander out into silence."

Katie brought her back by coming up to say that "Mr. Abraham was waiting to know if she would go out a little while, it was so fine."

Miss Axtell said that "she would not go,—she would wait."

Katie went to carry the message. Miss Axtell wandered a little. Between her words and memories I picked up the thread for her, and she went on before me.

"I took the direction of the village-pier, when I fled from Doctor Percival. An unusual number of boats had come in. I heard noises amid the shipping. At any other time I should have avoided the place. Now I drew near.

"Two men were slowly walking down the way. I heard one of them ask, 'Do you know who it is?'

"The other replied, 'No, I never saw him before; we had better watch him; he went on in a desperate way. I've seen it before, and it ended in'–

"He did not finish, although I was thirsting for the words; they both seemed arrested suddenly, then started on, and I watched whither they went.

"There was now no light, save that of the stars. I could scarcely keep them in sight. I went nearer,—hid myself behind one of the posts on the pier. They had gone upon one of the boats,—that which lay farthest down the stream. It was Bernard that they watched. I found him with my eyes before they reached where he stood. A boy came singing from his daily work; he passed close beside me, and, as he went, he beat upon the post with a boat's oar. I waited until I could come from my hiding-place without his seeing; then I went after him. I sent him for 'the gentleman that had gone down there,' telling him to say that 'a lady wished to see him.'

"Bernard came. I told him that I had been searching for him on the sands,—that I wanted to talk to him; and he and I walked on again, village-ward, as we had done on the last night. It was very hard to begin, to open the cruel theme,—to say to this person, who walked with folded arms, and eyes that I knew had no external sight, what I thought; but I must. When I had said all that I would have said to any other human soul, under like darkness, he lighted up the night of his sin with strange fires. He poured upon his family's past the light hereditary. Abraham had been true in his statements. Bernard McKey was not well-born. He told me this: that his father had been a destroyer of life; that God had been his Judge, and had now set the seal of the father's sin into the son's heart. Oh, it was fearful, this tide of agony with which that soul was overwhelmed! He pictured his deed. Abraham had found out the crime of his father, had cruelly sent it home on his own head, had said that a murderer's son could never find rest in the family of Axtell, had sent him forth, with hatred in his heart, to work out in shadow the very deed his father had wrought in substance, to destroy Mary Percival, the child of his best friend, and to strike from off the earth Abraham's arch of light. It was wonderful: a chance, a change, had killed Mary.

"Doctor Percival had that very afternoon, while we were gone, wrought changes in the little white office; hence the fatal mistake. Bernard had gone in, taken up a bottle from the very place where the article wanted had stood for two years, poured its contents into the cup, carried it in, and no hand stayed him. He was too blinded by suffering to see for himself. Doctor Percival's hand gave the draught, and Mary was dead. What should be done?

"'What shall I do? What would you have me to do?' asked Bernard.

"We were come to the church on our way. I stayed my steps, and thought of the letter that Abraham had given me; it came up for the first time since I knew of Mary's death. But I did not allude to it. I could not acknowledge, even to him, that I knew another had received the words that should have been spoken only to me; and sincerely I told him that he must go away, at once and for always,—that the deed his hand had unknowingly done must be borne in swift, solemn current through his life,—that he must live beside it until it reached the ocean to come: it could do no good to reveal it; it could arouse only new misery; it seemed better that it should be written on marble and in memory that 'God took her.'

"He took up the silence that came after my words, and filled it with an echoing question:—

"'If I go out, and bear this deed, as you say bear it, in silence and in suffering, will you,—you, to whom God has given a good inheritance, who know not the rush and roar of any evil in your soul, whose spring rises far back in ancestral natures,—will you stand between me and all this that I must bear? Will you be my rock, set here, in this village? May I come back at times, and tell you how I endure? If you will promise me this, I will go.'

"Why should he come to me? why not to the other one, to whom he told of Alice's death two years ago? He did not know that pride was the ever vernal sin of my race, that I had it to battle with. But I conquered, and promised I would help him, since it was all I had to do. A few more words were spoken; he was to write to me when he would come; and we parted, there, at the old church-door,—he promising to live, to try and make atonement for his sin,—I to hold his deed in keeping, alone of all the world, save Chloe, and in her I had trust. I did not see him again: he left the following day.

"You remember that I heard a rustling in the shrubbery, when Bernard fled from the office. It was my mother, watching me. She had seen and heard sufficient to convince her of what had been done. Mothers are endowed with wonderful intuitive perception. Abraham had been her one love from his childhood. Now came a strife in her nature. Bernard McKey had wronged Abraham, had taken the light out of his life, and a great longing for his punishment came up. How should it be effected? She believed that open judgment would awaken resistance in me,—that I would stand beside him then, in the face of all the world, and recompense him for his punishment,—I, an Axtell, her daughter. So she came to me with a compromise. She told me that she had heard what had been said,—that she knew the deed, had seen the cup,—that Abraham, knowing the act, would never forgive it, though done, as she acknowledged, in error; and she, my mother, to save the family, made conditions. Her knowledge should remain hers only, if Bernard McKey should remain such as he now was to me,—never to be more.

"'An easy condition,' I thought, 'since the letter Abraham gave'; and I said the two words to my mother,—

"'I promise.'

"'My daughter,' was her only answer; and she touched her child's forehead with two burning lips, and went away to watch Abraham through the night,—watch him tread the dark way, without Mary.

"Where now was the Mountain-Pine? higher than the Arbutus?

"Our mother had her trial. When she heard Abraham reproaching himself with having brought on a return of fever by refusing Mary's wish, of having been the means of her death, I know her heart ached to say, 'It was not you, Abraham, it was Bernard McKey who killed her.' But no, she did not; family pride towered above affection, and she was true to her promise, true to the last. She died with the secret hers.

"Bernard McKey's absence was much wondered at, although it began only one month earlier than the appointed time. Doctor Percival mourned his going as if he had been his son; he spoke to me of it. Mary was buried. I remember your little face on her burial-day; it was bright, and unconscious of the sad scene"; and Miss Axtell now sought to look into it, but it was not to be seen. I think she must have forgotten, at times, that it was to Mary's sister that she was telling her story. She waited a little, until I asked her to "tell me more."

"The face of that Autumn grew rosy, wrinkled, and died upon Winter's snowy bed; and yet I lived, and Abraham, and Bernard McKey perhaps,—I knew not. The year was nearly gone since Mary died, and no ray of knowledge had come from him. Every day I re-read those words written to some fair woman-soul, until after so many readings they began to take root in my heart. I found it out one day, and I began vigorously to tear them up. It was on the evening of the same day that Abraham came home: he had been away for several weeks. He left, with intentional seeming, a paper where I should see it; he had read with almost careless eyes what mine fell upon, for he believed that Bernard McKey was forgotten by me; he had kindly forborne to mention his name, since that one night wherein all our misery grew. I found there what I believed to be his death: the name and age were his own; the place was nothing,—he might be anywhere. My mother saw it, and a gladness, yes, a gladness came into her face: I watched its coming up. She thought she might now tell Abraham; but no, I held her to the promise. It had but two conditions: mine was to be perpetual; hers must be so.

"After that I grew pitiful for the poor heart that must have been made sorrowful by these words that never more would come into it, and so I picked up the trembling little roots that had been cast out, put them back into the warm soil, and let them grow: they might join hers now, for together they could twine around immortal bowers; and, as they grew, a great longing came up to go out and find this woman-soul who had drawn out such words from lips sealed forever. But no chance happened: no one came to our quiet village from the remote town in which she was when these words, that now were become mine, were penned."

MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN."

In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of Antietam, my household was startled from its slumbers by the loud summons of a telegraphic messenger. The air had been heavy all day with rumors of battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked the streets with throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation of the tidings any hour might bring.

We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was admitted. I took the envelope from his hand, opened it, and read:—

Hagerstown 17th

To– H–

Capt. H– wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at Keedysville

WILLIAM G LEDUC

Through the neck,—no bullet left in wound. Windpipe, food-pipe, carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, but still formidable, vessels, a great braid of nerves, each as big as a lamp-wick, spinal cord,—ought to kill at once, if at all. Thought not mortal, or not thought mortal,—which was it? The first; that is better than the second would be.—"Keedysville, a post-office, Washington Co., Maryland." Leduc? Leduc? Don't remember that name.—The boy is waiting for his money. A dollar and thirteen cents. Has nobody got thirteen cents? Don't keep that boy waiting,—how do we know what messages he has got to carry?

The boy had another message to carry. It was to the father of Lieutenant-Colonel Wilder Dwight, informing him that his son was grievously wounded in the same battle, and was lying at Boonsborough, a town a few miles this side of Keedysville. This I learned the next morning from the civil and attentive officials at the Central Telegraph-Office.

Calling upon this gentleman, I found that he meant to leave in the quarter past two o'clock train, taking with him Dr. George H. Gay, an accomplished and energetic surgeon, equal to any difficult question or pressing emergency. I agreed to accompany them, and we met in the cars. I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in having companions whose society would be a pleasure, whose feelings would harmonize with my own, and whose assistance I might, in case of need, be glad to claim.

It is of the journey which we began together, and which I finished apart, that I mean to give my "Atlantic" readers an account. They must let me tell my story in my own way, speaking of many little matters that interested or amused me, and which a certain leisurely class of elderly persons, who sit at their firesides and never travel, will, I hope, follow with a kind of interest. For, besides the main object of my excursion, I could not help being excited by the incidental sights and occurrences of a trip which to a commercial traveller or a newspaper-reporter would seem quite commonplace and undeserving of record. There are periods in which all places and people seem to be in a conspiracy to impress us with their individuality,—in which every ordinary locality seems to assume a special significance and to claim a particular notice,—in which every person we meet is either an old acquaintance or a character; days in which the strangest coincidences are continually happening, so that they get to be the rule, and not the exception. Some might naturally think that anxiety and the weariness of a prolonged search after a near relative would have prevented my taking any interest in or paying any regard to the little matters around me. Perhaps it had just the contrary effect, and acted like a diffused stimulus upon the attention. When all the faculties are wide-awake in pursuit of a single object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing emotion, they are often-times clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in respect to many collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly illustrated in his sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and as Hawthorne has developed with such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his wondrous story where Hester walks forth to meet her punishment.

Be that as it may,—though I set out with a full and heavy heart, though many times my blood chilled with what were perhaps needless and unwise fears, though I broke through all my habits without thinking about them, which is almost as hard in certain circumstances as for one of our young fellows to leave his sweet-heart and go into a Peninsular campaign, though I did not always know when I was hungry nor discover that I was thirsting, though I had a worrying ache and inward tremor underlying all the outward play of the senses and the mind, yet it is the simple truth that I did look out of the car-windows with an eye for all that passed, that I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that I did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity, and from time to time even laugh very nearly as those do who are attacked with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm.

By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars. A communicative friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one's side during a railroad-journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and in. itself agreeable. "A fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my motto. Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous experiment,—fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,—all this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,—many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of fresh juices. My friends spared me this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness produced by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be the exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless inebriety in what we know as sea-sickness. Where the horizon opened widely, it pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid movement of near objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant ones. Looking from a right-hand window, for instance, the fences close by glide swiftly backward, or to the right, while the distant hills not only do not appear to move backward, but look by contrast with the fences near at hand as if they were moving forward, or to the left; and thus the whole landscape becomes a mighty wheel revolving about an imaginary axis somewhere in the middle-distance.

My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and longest-established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied them. We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated. The traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melancholy experience of Shenstone, and have to sigh over the reflection that he has found "his warmest welcome at an inn," has something to learn at the offices of the great city-hotels. The unheralded guest who is honored by mere indifference may think himself blest with singular good-fortune.

If the despot of the Patent Annunciator is only mildly contemptuous in his manner, let the victim look upon it as a personal favor. The coldest welcome that a threadbare curate ever got at the door of a bishop's palace, the most icy reception that a country-cousin ever received at the city-mansion of a mushroom millionnaire, is agreeably tepid, compared to that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms you to the more or less elevated circle of his inverted Inferno vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your name on his dog's-eared register. I have less hesitation in unburdening myself of this uncomfortable statement, as on this particular trip I met with more than one exception to the rule. Officials become brutalized, I suppose, as a matter of course. One cannot expect an office-clerk to embrace tenderly every stranger who comes in with a carpet-bag, or a telegraph-operator to burst into tears over every unpleasant message he receives for transmission. Still, humanity is not always totally extinguished in these persons. I discovered a youth in the telegraph-office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant in conversation, and as graciously responsive to inoffensive questions, as if I had been his childless opulent uncle, and my will not made.

On the road again the next morning, over the ferry, into the cars with sliding panels and fixed windows, so that in summer the whole side of the car may be made transparent. New Jersey is, to the apprehension of a traveller, a double-headed suburb rather than a State. Its dull red dust looks like the dried and powdered mud of a battle-field. Peach-trees are common, and champagne-orchards. Canal-boats, drawn by mules, swim by, feeling their way along like blind men led by dogs. I had a mighty passion come over me to be the captain of one,—to glide back and forward upon a sea never roughened by storms,—to float where I could not sink,—to navigate where there is no shipwreck,—to lie languidly on the deck and govern the huge craft by a word or the movement of a finger: there was something of railroad intoxication in the fancy, but who has not often envied a cobbler in his stall?

The boys cry the "N'-York Heddle," instead of "Herald"; I remember that years ago in Philadelphia; we must be getting near the farther end of the dumb-bell suburb. A bridge has been swept away by a rise of the waters, so we must approach Philadelphia by the river. Her physiognomy is not distinguished; nez camus, as a Frenchman would say; no illustrious steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the town looking bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's dress that trails on the sidewalk. The New Ironsides lies at one of the wharves, elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as they rise, like the walls of a hock-glass.

I went straight to the house in Walnut Street where the Captain would be heard of, if anywhere in this region. His lieutenant-colonel was there, gravely wounded; his college-friend and comrade in arms, a son of the house, was there, injured in a similar way; another soldier, brother of the last, was there, prostrate with fever. A fourth bed was waiting ready for the Captain, but not one word had been heard of him, though inquiries had been made in the towns from and through which the father had brought his two sons and the lieutenant-colonel. And so my search is, like a "Ledger" story, to be continued.

I rejoined my companions in time to take the noon-train for Baltimore. Our company was gaining in number as it moved onwards. We had found upon the train from New York a lovely, lonely lady, the wife of one of our most spirited Massachusetts officers, the brave Colonel of the –th Regiment, going to seek her wounded husband at Middletown, a place lying directly in our track. She was the light of our party while we were together on our pilgrimage, a fair, gracious woman, gentle, but courageous,

–"ful plesant and amiable of port, —estatelich of manere, And to ben holden digne of reverence."