The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862

And now, as I sit with Kate on this grassy mound, this mild summer afternoon, and write these lines, we talk together of her short, sad life, of her calm, peaceful death, and floating down through the long years, comes to us the blessing of her pure, redeemed spirit, pleasant as the breath of the flowers that are growing on her grave. We look up, and, through our thick falling tears, read again the words which we placed over her in the long ago:

FRANCES MANDELL:

Aged 23

SHE SUFFERED AND SHE DIED

WEEP FOR HER

TAKE CARE!

When the blades of shears are biting,
Finger not their edges keen;
When man and wife are fighting,
He faces ill who comes between.
John Bull, in our grief delighting,
Take care how you intervene!

SHOULDER-STRAPS;

Or, MEN, MANNERS, AND MOTIVES IN 1862

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY AND EPISODICAL—MEASURING-WORMS, DUSSELDORF PICTURES, AND PARISIAN FORTUNE-TELLERS.

This is going to be an odd jumble.

Without being an odd jumble, it could not possibly reflect American life and manners at the present time with any degree of fidelity; for the foundations of the old in society have been broken up as effectually, within the past two years, as were those of the great deep at the time of Noah's flood, and the disruption has not taken place long enough ago for the new to have assumed any appearance of stability. The old deities of fashion have been swept away in the flood of revolution, and the new which are eventually to take their place have scarcely yet made themselves apparent through the general confusion. The millionaire of two years ago, intent at that time on the means by which the revenues from his brown-stone houses and pet railroad stocks could be spent to the most showy advantage, has become the struggling man of to-day, intent upon keeping up appearances, and happy if diminished and doubtful rents can even be made to meet increasing taxes. The struggling man of that time has meanwhile sprung into fortune and position, through lucky adventures in government transportations or army contracts; and the jewelers of Broadway and Chestnut street are busy resetting the diamonds of decayed families, to sparkle on brows and bosoms that only a little while ago beat with pride at an added weight of California paste or Kentucky rock-crystal. The most showy equipages that have this year been flashing at Newport and Saratoga, were never seen between the bathing-beach and Fort Adams, or between Congress Spring and the Lake, in the old days; and if opera should ever revive, and the rich notes of melody repay the impresario, as they enrapture the audience at the Academy, there will be new faces in the most prominent boxes, almost as outre and unaccustomed in their appearance there as was that of the hard-featured Western President, framed in a shock head and a turn-down collar, meeting the gaze of astonished Murray Hill, when he passed an hour here on his way to the inauguration.

Quite as notable a change has taken place in personal reputation. Many of the men on whom the country depended as most likely to prove able defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall. Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly—impotent for good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile sprung forth from the mass of the people, and equally astonished themselves and others by the power, wisdom and courage they have displayed. In cabinet and camp, in army and navy, in the editorial chair and in the halls of eloquence, the men from whom least was expected have done most, and those upon whom the greatest expectations had been founded have only given another proof of the fallacy of all human calculations. All has been change, all has been transition, in the estimation men have held of themselves, and the light in which they presented themselves to each other.

Opinions of duties and recognitions of necessities have known a change not less remarkable. What yesterday we believed to be fallacy, to-day we know to be truth. What seemed the fixed and immutable purpose of God only a few short months ago, we have already discovered to have been founded only in human passion or ambition. What seemed eternal has passed away, and what appeared to be evanescent has assumed stability. The storm has been raging around us, and doing its work not the less destructively because we failed to perceive that we were passing through any thing more threatening than a summer shower. While we have stood upon the bank of the swelling river, and pointed to some structure of old rising on the bank, declaring that not a stone could be moved until the very heavens should fall, little by little the foundations have been undermined, and the full crash of its falling has first awoke us from our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live, has fallen and been destroyed; and yet the nation does not die, but gives promise of a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is springing forth the young and vigorous new. Change, transition, every where and in all things: how can society fail to be disrupted, and who can speak, write, or think with the calm decorum of by-gone days?

All this is obtrusively philosophical, of course, and correspondingly out of place. But it may serve as a sort of forlorn hope—mental food for powder—while the narrative reserve is brought forward; and there is a dim impression on the mind of the writer that it may be found to have some connection with that which is necessarily to follow.

So let the odd jumble be prepared, perhaps with ingredients as incongruous as those which at present compose what we used to call the republic, and as unevenly distributed as have been honors and emoluments during a struggle which should have found every man in his place, and every national energy employed to its best purpose.

I was crossing the City Hall Park to dinner at Delmonico's, one afternoon early in July, in company with a friend who had spent some years in Europe, and only recently returned. He may be called Ned Martin, for the purposes of this narration. He had left the country in its days of peace and prosperity, a frank, whole-souled young artist, his blue eyes clear as the day, and his faith in humanity unbounded. He had resided for a long time at Paris, and at other periods been sojourning at Rome, Florence, Vienna, Dusseldorf, and other places where art studies called him or artist company invited him. He had come back to his home and country after the great movements of the war were inaugurated, and when the great change which had been initiated was most obvious to an observing eye. I had heard of his arrival in New York, but failed to meet him, and not long after heard that he had gone down to visit the lines of our army on the Potomac. Then I had heard of his return some weeks after, and eventually I had happened upon him drinking a good-will glass with a party of friends at one of the popular down-town saloons, when stepping in for a post-prandial cigar. The result of that meeting had been a promise that we would dine together one evening, and the after-result was, that we were crossing the Park to keep that promise.

I have said that Ned Martin left this country a frank, blue-eyed, happy-looking young artist, who seemed to be without a care or a suspicion. It had only needed a second glance at his face, on the day when I first met him at the bar of the drinking-saloon, to know that a great change had fallen upon him. He was yet too young for age to have left a single furrow upon his face; not a fleck of silver had yet touched his brown hair, nor had his fine, erect form been bowed by either over-labor or dissipation. Yet he was changed, and the second glance showed that the change was in the eyes. Amid the clear blue there lay a dark, sombre shadow, such as only shows itself in eyes that have been turned inward. We usually say of the wearer of such eyes, after looking into them a moment, 'That man has studied much;' 'has suffered much;' or, 'he is a spiritualist.' By the latter expression, we mean that he looks more or less beneath the surface of events that meet him in the world—that he is more or less a student of the spiritual in mentality, and of the supernatural in cause and effect. Such eyes do not stare, they merely gaze. When they look at you, they look at something else through you and behind you, of which you may or may not be a part.

Let me say here, (this chapter being professedly episodical,) that the painter who can succeed in transferring to canvas that expression of seeing more than is presented to the physical eye, has achieved a triumph over great difficulties. Frequent visitors to the old Dusseldorf Gallery will remember two instances, perhaps by the same painter, of the eye being thus made to reveal the inner thought and a life beyond that passing at the moment. The first and most notable is in the 'Charles the Second Fleeing from the Battle of Worcester.' The king and two nobles are in the immediate foreground, in flight, while far away the sun is going down in a red glare behind the smoke of battle, the lurid flames of the burning town, and the royal standard just fluttering down from the battlements of a castle lost by the royal arms at the very close of Cromwell's 'crowning mercy.' Through the smoke of the middle distance can be dimly seen dusky forms in flight, or in the last hopeless conflict. Each of the nobles at the side of the fugitive king is heavily armed, with sword in hand, mounted on heavy, galloping horses going at high speed; and each is looking out anxiously, with head turned aside as he flies, for any danger which may menace—not himself, but the sovereign. Charles Stuart, riding between them, is mounted upon a dark, high-stepping, pure-blooded English horse. He wears the peaked hat of the time, and his long hair—that which afterward became so notorious in the masks and orgies of Whitehall, and in the prosecution of his amours in the purlieus of the capital—floats out in wild dishevelment from his shoulders. He is dressed in the dark velvet, short cloak, and broad, pointed collar peculiar to pictures of himself and his unfortunate father; shows no weapon, and is leaning ungracefully forward, as if outstripping the hard-trotting speed of his horse. But the true interest of this figure, and of the whole picture, is concentrated in the eyes. Those sad, dark eyes, steady and immovable in their fixed gaze, reveal whole pages of history and whole years of suffering. The fugitive king is not thinking of his flight, of any dangers that may beset him, of the companions at his side, or even of where he shall lay his periled head in the night that is coming. Those eyes have shut away the physical and the real, and through the mists of the future they are trying to read the great question of fate! Worcester is lost, and with it a kingdom: is he to be henceforth a crownless king and a hunted fugitive, or has the future its compensations? This is what the fixed and glassy eyes are saying to every beholder, and there is not one who does not answer the question with a mental response forced by that mute appeal of suffering thought: 'The king shall have his own again!'

The second picture in the same collection is much smaller, and commands less attention; but it tells another story of the same great struggle between King and Parliament, through the agency of the same feature. A wounded cavalier, accompanied by one of his retainers, also wounded, is being forced along on foot, evidently to imprisonment, by one of Cromwell's Ironsides and a long-faced, high-hatted Puritan cavalry-man, both on horseback, and a third on foot, with musquetoon on shoulder. The cavalier's garments are rent and blood-stained, and there is a bloody handkerchief binding his brow and telling how, when his house was surprised and his dependents slaughtered, he himself fought till he was struck down, bound and overpowered. He strides sullenly along, looking neither to the right nor the left; and the triumphant captors behind him know nothing of the story that is told in his face. The eyes, fixed and steady in the shadow of the bloody bandage, tell nothing of the pain of his wound or the tension of the cords which are binding his crossed wrists. In their intense depth, which really seems to convey the impression of looking through forty feet of the still but dangerous waters of Lake George and seeing the glimmering of the golden sand beneath, we read of a burned house and an outraged family, and we see a prophecy written there, that if his mounted guards could read, they would set spurs and flee away like the wind—a calm, silent, but irrevocable prophecy: 'I can bear all this, for my time is coming! Not a man of all these will live, not a roof-tree that shelters them but will be in ashes, when I take my revenge!' Not a gazer but knows, through those marvelous eyes alone, that the day is coming that he will have his revenge, and that the subject of pity is the victorious Roundhead instead of the wounded and captive cavalier!

I said, before this long digression broke the slender chain of narration, that some strange, spiritualistic shadow lay in the eyes of Ned Martin; and I could have sworn, without the possibility of an error, that he had become an habitual reader of the inner life, and almost beyond question a communicant with influences which some hold to be impossible and others unlawful.

The long measuring-worms hung pendent from their gossamer threads, as we passed through the Park, as they have done, destroying the foliage, in almost every city of the Northern States. One brushed my face as I passed, and with the stick in my hand I struck the long threads of gossamer and swept several of the worms to the ground. One, a very large and long one, happened to fall on Martin's shoulder, lying across the blue flannel of his coat in the exact position of a shoulder-strap.

'I say, Martin,' I said, 'I have knocked down one of the worms upon you.'

'Have you?' he replied listlessly, 'then be good enough to brush it off, if it does not crawl off itself. I do not like worms.'

'I do not know who does like them,' I said, 'though I suppose, being 'worms of the dust,' we ought to bear affection instead of disgust toward our fellow-reptiles. But, funnily enough,' and I held him still by the shoulder for a moment to contemplate the oddity, 'this measuring-worm, which is a very big one, has fallen on your shoulder, and seems disposed to remain there, in the very position of a shoulder-strap! You must belong to the army!'

It is easy to imagine what would be the quick, convulsive writhing motion with which one would shrink aside and endeavor to get instantaneously away from it, when told that an asp, a centipede or a young rattlesnake was lying on the shoulder, and ready to strike its deadly fangs into the neck. But it is not easy to imagine that even a nervous woman, afraid of a cockroach and habitually screaming at a mouse, would display any extraordinary emotion on being told that a harmless measuring-worm had fallen upon the shoulder of her dress. What was my surprise, then, to see the face of Martin, that had been so impassive the moment before when told that the worm had fallen upon his coat, suddenly assume an expression of the most awful fear and agony, and his whole form writhe with emotion, as he shrunk to one side in the effort to eject the intruder instantaneously!

'Good God! Off with it—quick! Quick, for heaven's sake!' he cried, in a frightened, husky voice that communicated his terror to me, and almost sinking to the ground as he spoke.

Of course I instantly brushed the little reptile away; but it was quite a moment before he assumed an erect position, and I saw two or three quick shudders pass over his frame, such as I had not seen since, many a long year before, I witnessed the horrible tortures of a strong man stricken with hydrophobia. Then he asked, in a voice low, quavering and broken:

'Is it gone?'

'Certainly it is!' I said. 'Why, Martin, what under heaven can have affected you in this manner? I told you that I had knocked a worm on your coat, and you did not appear to heed it any more than if it had been a speck of dust. It was only when I mentioned the shape it had assumed, that you behaved so unaccountably! What does it mean? Are you afraid of worms, or only of shoulder-straps?' And I laughed at the absurdity of the latter supposition.

'Humph!' said Martin, who seemed to have recovered his equanimity, but not shaken off the impression. 'You laugh. Perhaps you will laugh more when I tell you that it was not the worm, as a worm, of which I was thinking at all, and that my terror—yes, I need not mince words, I was for the moment in abject terror—had to do altogether with the shape that little crawling pest had assumed, and the part of my coat on which he had taken a fancy to lodge himself!'

'No, I should not laugh,' I said; 'but I should ask an explanation of what seems very strange and unaccountable. Shall I lacerate a feeling, or tread upon ground made sacred by a grief, if I do so?'

'Not at all,' was the reply. 'In fact, I feel at this moment very much as the Ancient Mariner may have done the moment before he met the wedding-guest—when, in fact, he had nobody to button-hole, and felt the strong necessity of boring some one!' There was a tone of gayety in this reply, which told me how changeable and mercurial my companion could be; and I read an evident understanding of the character and mission of the noun-substantive 'bore,' which assured me that he was the last person in the world likely to play such a part. 'However,' he concluded, 'wait a bit. When we have concluded the raspberries, and wet our lips with green-seal, I will tell you all that I myself know of a very singular episode in an odd life.'

Half an hour after, the conditions of which he spoke had been accomplished, over the marble at Delmonico's, and he made me the following very singular relation:

'I had returned from a somewhat prolonged stay at Vienna,' he said, 'to Paris, late in 1860. During the fall and winter of that year I spent a good deal of time at the Louvre, making a few studies, and satisfying myself as to some identities that had been called in question during my rambles through the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. I lodged in the little Rue Marie Stuart, not far from the Rue Montorgeuil, and only two or three minutes' walk from the Louvre, having a baker with a pretty wife for my landlord, and a cozy little room in which three persons could sit comfortably, for my domicil. As I did not often have more than two visitors, my room was quite sufficient; and as I spent a large proportion of my evenings at other places than my lodgings, the space was three quarters of the time more than I needed.

'I do not know that I can have any objection to your knowing, before I go any further, that I am and have been for some years a believer in that of which Hamlet speaks when he says: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.' You may call me a Spiritualist, if you like, for I have no reverence for or aversion to names. I do not call myself so; I only say that I believe that more things come to us in the way of knowledge, than we read, hear, see, taste, smell, or feel with the natural and physical organs. I know, from the most irrefragable testimony, that there are communications made between one and another, when too far apart to reach each other by any of the recognized modes of intercourse; though how or why they are made I have no definite knowledge. Electricity—that 'tongs with which God holds the world'—as a strong but odd thinker once said in my presence, may be the medium of communication; but even this must be informed by a living and sentient spirit, or it can convey nothing. People learn what they would not otherwise know, through mediums which they do not recognize and by processes which they can not explain; and to know this is to have left the beaten track of old beliefs, and plunged into a maze of speculation, which probably makes madmen of a hundred while it is making a wise man of one. But I am wandering too far and telling you nothing.

'One of my few intimates in Paris, a young Prussian by the name of Adolph Von Berg, had a habit of visiting mediums, clairvoyants, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, fortune-tellers. Though I had been in company with clairvoyants in many instances, I had never, before my return to Paris in the late summer of 1860, entered any one of those places in which professional fortune-tellers carried on their business. It was early in September, I think, that at the earnest solicitation of Von Berg, who had been reading and smoking with me at my lodgings, I went with him, late in the evening, to a small two-story house in the Rue La Reynie Ogniard, a little street down the Rue Saint Denis toward the quays of the Seine, and running from Saint Denis across to the Rue Saint Martin. The house seemed to me to be one of the oldest in Paris, although built of wood; and the wrinkled and crazy appearance of the front was eminently suggestive of the face of an old woman on which time had long been plowing furrows to plant disease. The interior of the house, when we entered it by the dingy and narrow hallway, that night, well corresponded with the exterior. A tallow-candle in a tin sconce was burning on the wall, half hiding and half revealing the grime on the plastering, the cobwebs in the corners, and the rickety stairs by which it might be supposed that the occupants ascended to the second story.

'My companion tinkled a small bell that lay upon a little uncovered table in the hall, (the outer door having been entirely unfastened, to all appearance,) and a slattern girl came out from an inner room. On recognizing my companion, who had visited the house before, she led the way without a word to the same room she had herself just quitted. There was nothing remarkable in this. A shabby table, and two or three still more shabby chairs, occupied the room, and a dark wax-taper stood on the table, while at the side opposite the single window a curtain of some dark stuff shut in almost one entire side of the apartment. We took seats on the rickety chairs, and waited in silence, Adolph informing me that the etiquette (strange name for such a place) of the house did not allow of conversation, not with the proprietors, carried on in that apartment sacred to the divine mysteries.

'Perhaps fifteen minutes had elapsed, and I had grown fearfully tired of waiting, when the corner of the curtain was suddenly thrown back, and the figure of a woman stood in the space thus created. Every thing behind her seemed to be in darkness; but some description of bright light, which did not show through the curtain at all, and which seemed almost dazzling enough to be Calcium or Drummond, shed its rays directly upon her side-face, throwing every feature from brow to chin into bold relief, and making every fold of her dark dress visible. But I scarcely saw the dress, the face being so remarkable beyond any thing I had ever witnessed. I had looked to see an old, wrinkled hag—it being the general understanding that all witches and fortune-tellers must be long past the noon of life; but instead, I saw a woman who could not have been over thirty-five or forty, with a figure of regal magnificence, and a face that would have been, but for one circumstance, beautiful beyond description. Apelles never drew and Phidias never chiseled nose or brow of more classic perfection, and I have never seen the bow of Cupid in the mouth of any woman more ravishingly shown than in that feature of the countenance of the sorceress.

'I said that but for one circumstance, that face would have been beautiful beyond description. And yet no human eye ever looked upon a face more hideously fearful than it was in reality. Even a momentary glance could not be cast upon it without a shudder, and a longer gaze involved a species of horrible fascination which affected one like a nightmare. You do not understand yet what was this remarkable and most hideous feature. I can scarcely find words to describe it to you so that you can catch the full force of the idea—I must try, however. You have often seen Mephistopheles in his flame-colored dress, and caught some kind of impression that the face was of the same hue, though the fact was that it was of the natural color, and only affected by the lurid character of the dress and by the Satanic penciling of the eyebrows! You have? Well, this face was really what that seemed for the moment to be. It was redder than blood-red as fire, and yet so strangely did the flame-color play through it that you knew no paint laid upon the skin could have produced the effect. It almost seemed that the skin and the whole mass of flesh were transparent, and that the red color came from some kind of fire or light within, as the red bottle in a druggist's window might glow when you were standing full in front of it, and the gas was turned on to full height behind. Every feature—brow, nose, lips, chin, even the eyes themselves, and their very pupil seemed to be pervaded and permeated by this lurid flame; and it was impossible for the beholder to avoid asking himself whether there were indeed spirits of flame—salamandrines—who sometimes existed out of their own element and lived and moved as mortals.

'Have I given you a strange and fearful picture? Be sure that I have not conveyed to you one thousandth part of the impression made upon myself, and that until the day I die that strange apparition will remain stamped upon the tablets of my mind. Diabolical beauty! infernal ugliness!—I would give half my life, be it longer or shorter, to be able to explain whence such things can come, to confound and stupefy all human calculation!'

CHAPTER II

MORE OF PARISIAN FORTUNE-TELLERS—THE VISIONS OF THE WHITE MIST—REBELLION, GRIEF, HOPE, BRAVERY AND DESPAIR

It was after a second bottle of green-seal had flashed out its sparkles into the crystal, that Ned Martin drew a long breath like that drawn by a man discharging a painful and necessary duty, and resumed his story:

'You may some time record this for the benefit of American men and women,' he went on, 'and if you are wise you will deal chiefly in the language to which they are accustomed. I speak the French, of course, nearly as well and as readily as the English; but I think in my native tongue, as most men continue to do, I believe, no matter how many dialects they acquire; and I shall not interlard this little narrative with any French words that can just as well be translated into our vernacular.

'Well, as I was saying, there stood my horribly beautiful fiend, and there I sat spell-bound before her. As for Adolph, though he had told me nothing in advance of the peculiarities of her appearance, he had been fully aware of them, of course, and I had the horrible surprise all to myself. I think the sorceress saw the mingled feeling in my face, and that a smile blended of pride and contempt contorted the proud features and made the ghastly face yet more ghastly for one moment. If so, the expression soon passed away, and she stood, as before, the incarnation of all that was terrible and mysterious. At length, still retaining her place and fixing her eyes upon Von Berg, she spoke, sharply, brusquely, and decidedly: