Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 85, January, 1875

"No, you needn't."

"Bessie," he said, "you are not well, and something is vexing you. Could you not tell me about it. I mean nothing but kindness."

"I know you don't," she said almost fiercely, "and I hate kindness: it's an insult."

He stood in blank astonishment, "An insult?" he said.

"Yes, an insult; and if you were not obtuse you would see it. But you don't see and you don't feel, or you would never have tried to make any one care for you for whom you did not care a bit. But I won't care for you, and I don't."

Off her guard, she had been stung into this. She was standing away from him, her head erect and her eyes gleaming through tears: Mary Stuart herself could not have been more effective.

"Care for you! not care for you!" he said in a voice he could hardly control. "I have cared for you as I never cared for a thing on earth: I have loved and shall love you as I have never loved a human being."

"How am I to believe it? Why did you not say it? Why did you not say it without making me ashamed of myself?"

"Ashamed! Oh, Bessie, I only feared to annoy you."

"Annoy!"

He gathered her to him and kissed her.

A castle all to themselves at four o'clock in the morning is a piece of fortune that rarely falls to lovers, and they need not expect it; but those great thick walls were no way taken by surprise: they had not been confidants of this kind of thing off and on for four or five hundred years to be taken by surprise now. Whether after such long familiarity with the old story they felt it any way stale, you will readily believe they did not say.

VI

"I've forgotten the abbot entirely," said Edwin when he had time to come to himself after the first draught of miraculous champagne. "I was on my way to investigate his ghost when I heard an unaccountable scream."

"I never screamed before, and I don't think I shall ever scream again: I don't know how I have been so weak to-night."

"Weakness always draws out kindness," said Edwin.

"I would rather be weak than obtuse," said Bessie.

"But it is better to be only obtuse than both. I know someone who was both."

Well, what was I to think, and what could I do?"

"Nothing better than you did—make a declar—"

"What were you saying about the abbot's ghost?"

"I was on my way to have an interview with it when—"

"What was it like, and where did you find it?"

"It was like a column of light standing not far from the house near the corner of the abbey-field."

"And you did not think of any explanation of the phenomenon?"

"No, I did not: it seemed more mysterious even than the ringing of the bell."

"To obtuse people it does."

"I thought the abbot might be feeling without a home, and sympathized with him, I assure you, very heartily."

"I can tell you what it is: the servants had to rise at three this morning to work. It is the light shining out from the laundry-window: I've seen it often enough."

"Well, it was a providential ghost for you and Edwin."

"[illegible]" said John when they were assembled at breakfast next morning, looking no worse for the excitement of the previous evening, having all slept well: if the bell had rung it had disturbed no one at all. Mr. Forrester and Bessie had not made any one the wiser of the well-timed appearance of the abbot's ghost which had played such an effective part in their previous night's drama,—"I say," he said looking at Mr. Forrester and then at Bessie, "there is some understanding between you two; you are always looking at each other, and when you entered the room this morning you [illegible], and started off [illegible] been caught. But I have [illegible] this time."

Bessie realized that her secret had become common property, and blushed becomingly.

Mr. Forrester said, "What have you suspected, John?"

"That Bessie and you laid your heads together to make the bell ring last night to frighten us. Remember, I'm not stupid altogether."

"I assure you, John, I had nothing to do with the ringing of the bell," Bessie said.

"Nor had I," said Edwin.

"That's queer, then," said John; "but I'm sure there's something of some kind between you two: you're planning something, I know. What is it?"

"Wise people don't reveal their plans to every one till near the time for executing them, John," said Edwin.

"Oh, very well," John answered: "you can keep them to yourselves. I dare say it's nothing of consequence;" and having finished his breakfast, John was off to his out-door business. The shortest cut to his destination—and he always took short cuts—was through the kitchen, and as he hastily brushed along the wall toward the door he was brought up suddenly by a loud peal of the bell, and he looked at one of the servants, who was working at the table, as much as to say, "Do you hear that?"

She answered his look: "Yes, I ha'en, but there's naebody at the door. It was yu that rang the bell: ye cam against that bag of worsted clues for durning that I hung on the bell-wine yesterday. When onybody happens to touch it the weight o' 't gars the bell ring; I would hae to ta'en off."

With this simple and inglorious explanation John rushed to the dining-room where he found Mrs. Forrester and the châtelaine in deep Conspiracy again; and to this hour the ghost of Cockhoolet is a matter (if you can use that word in connection with a ghost at all) of faith and not of sight.

When Mrs. and Mrs. Ormiston returned they found that their eldest daughter was engaged to be married, which surprised them as little as it did the old woman but moved them a good deal more.

THE LEADEN ARROW

A wondrous half-century was that which forms an isthmus rather than a bridge between the Middle Ages and the times termed Modern. Exit the Last of the Barons—enter the printing-press. Exit Boabdil el Chico—enter Columbus and Da Gama. The plot thickened as the cinquecenti hove in view. The last years were the most pregnant. While the last sigh of the Moor was dying into the murmurs of the Xenil, that solitary shout that will ring while earth lasts went up from the bows of the Pinta. Together came America and the sea-way to India and—the rifle. For in 1498, when Buonarotti was at his prime, Raphael, fifteen years old, had just taken his seat at the paternal easel, and the scenes of the Lusiad were in progress, "barrels were first grooved at Venice."

Who grooved them we are not told. The name of that artist has not survived, though we still remember his contemporary townsman, Titian. Strictly, he is not entitled to the immortality of an originator. That belongs to the unknown savage who, in the miocene era probably, first gave a twist to the feather of his arrow, thereby communicating to it a revolving motion at right angles to the line of flight, and making it an "arm of precision." But pre-historic artillery we may dismiss or leave to Milton. The blind bard omits to inform us whether the guns used in the great pounding-match between Lucifer and Michael were smooth-bores or rifles. The strong presumption is that they were exclusively the former, and that a well-served battery of Parrotts would have silenced them in fifteen minutes. By giving him a few pieces of the kind the poet would have further brightened the feather he sets in Satan's cap as the benefactor of mankind by inventing gunpowder and shortening wars. The bow he presents to us as an old and familiar weapon even at the date of that first and greatest of pitched battles. Its claim, as the parent of projectile implements, is recognized in the common etymology of arcus, arcualia—artillery. Arblast, arquebuse, blunderbuss, mark a humbler collateral descent in the same verbal family. The ballista, or fifty-man-power bow, constituted the heavy, and the individual article the light, artillery of twenty centuries ago. Slings and javelins, being for hand-to-hand fighting (David was near enough to hold an easy conversation with Goliath before bringing him down), can hardly be brought within the designation. The twang of either heavy or light was but a thin contribution to the orchestra of battle compared to "the diapason of the cannonade." How much we have lost in the absence of this element of tremendous noise from the conflicts of ancient days! What a tool it would have been in Homer's hands! How trivial, to the author of the book of Job, would have seemed the noise of the captains and the shouting! We cannot, indeed, quite suppress the fancy that some mightier counter-concussion must have filled the air at Thrasimene, when "an earthquake reeled unheededly away:" Nemo pugnantium senserit, avers Livy. But nothing is said of it. The old heroes died in silence, like the wolf "biting hard among the dying dogs."

A well-known essay of a modern poet beautifully uses this piece of the modern machinery of his craft. Dryden here makes distance mellow the thunder of a naval fight into a musical undertone. The great sea-fight between the duke of York and the Dutch, fought within hearing of London, left "the town almost empty" of its anxious citizens, whose "dreadful suspense would not allow them to rest at home," but drew them into the eastern fields and suburbs, "all seeking the noise in the depth of silence." Dryden and three friends took a barge and descended the river. Once clear of the crowded port above Greenwich, "they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently; and then, every one favoring his own curiosity with a strict silence, it was not long ere they perceived the air to break about them like the noise of distant thunder or of swallows in a chimney; those little undulations of sound, though almost vanishing before they reached them, yet still seeming to retain somewhat of their first horror which they had between the fleets. After they had attentively listened till such time as the sound by little and little went from them, Eugenius, lifting up his head and taking notice of it, was the first who congratulated to the rest that happy omen of our nation's victory."

This, the eloquent eolian music of distant and unseen battle, was unheard by the ancient cities and their chroniclers and poets. It will grow again less familiar as rifled ordnance is introduced, with its thinner and sharper style of expression. Waterloo appears to have been heard farther than Sedan or Metz, although its pieces were but popguns compared with those that spoke the requiem of the Third Napoleon. And perhaps, if we allow for smallness in number and calibre, those employed by Robert the Bruce at the battle of Werewater in 1327—said to be the first recorded occasion in Europe—were more vociferous than their successors of to-day. Few and cumbrous they must indeed have been, since Edward III. could only bring four into the field at Crécy; and they did far less service than the twanging cloth-yard shaft in deciding the event of that conflict.

It was not till centuries later that the rifle perceptibly exerted its treble voice in the multitudinous debates of the ultima ratio. Shrill as John Randolph's, its pipe, once set up, was very attentively and respectfully listened to. Like his, it spoke from the woods of America. "Stand your ground, my brave fellows," shouted Colonel Washington under the sycamores of the Monongahela on the 9th of July, 1755, "and draw your sights for the honor of old Virginia!" The colonial rifle covered the retreat of the British queen's-arm, if retreat such a rout as Braddock's could be called.

It is about the same time that we find a British writer, who had witnessed the efficiency of the rifle as a companion implement to the axe in pushing European settlement on this continent, saying, "Whatever state shall thoroughly comprehend the nature and advantages of rifle-pieces, and, having facilitated and completed their construction, shall introduce into its armies their general use, with a dexterity in the management of them, will by this means acquire a superiority which will almost equal anything that has been done at any time by the particular excellence of any one kind of firearms, and will perhaps fall but little short of the wonderful effects which histories relate to have been formerly produced by the first inventors of firearms."

This was written in 1748, at which time the rifle was used only by the hunters of the Alps and the hunters of the American backwoods; the latter having doubtless derived it from the former through German immigration. Bull's conservatism, however, was in the way. The lessons of Fort Duquesne, of Saratoga and of New Orleans were successively wasted on him. He did arm one regiment, the Ninety-fifth, with this weapon toward the close of the last century, but for a long time it stood alone in the royal service. Austria had previously maintained some corps of Tyrolese Jägers. The French fought through all the wars of their Revolution without having recourse to the rifle, save in the campaign of 1793. It is singular that the keen eye of Napoleon failed to detect its value, especially when we note the use he made of light troops. The fate of Nelson justifies the idea that a large body of good riflemen might have changed the issue of Trafalgar.