 | III. Marjorie Daw, and other people |  |
3. III.
But Mr. O'Rouke was not to be found. With
amiable cynicism Mr. Bilkins directed his steps
in the first instance to the police station, quite
confident that a bird of Mr. O'Rouke's plumage
would be brought to perch in such a cage. But
not so much as a feather of him was discoverable.
The Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian
resort in Rivermouth; there were five
or six other low drinking-shops scattered about
town, and through these Mr. Bilkins went conscientiously.
He then explored various blind
alleys, known haunts of the missing man, and
took a careful survey of the wharves along the
river on his way home. He even shook the apple-tree
near the stable with a vague hope of
bringing down Mr. O'Rouke, but brought down
nothing except a few winter apples, which, being
both unripe and unsound, were not perhaps bad
representatives of the object of his search.
That evening a small boy stopped at the door
identified as Mr. O'Rouke's, which had been
found on Neal's Wharf. This would have told
against another man; but O'Rouke was always
leaving his hat on a wharf. Margaret's distress
is not to be pictured. She fell back upon and
clung to the idea that Larry had drowned himself,
not intentionally, maybe; possibly he had
fallen overboard while intoxicated.
The late Mr. Buckle has informed us that
death by drowning is regulated by laws as inviolable
and beautiful as those of the solar system;
that a certain percentage of the earth's population
is bound to drown itself annually, whether
it wants to or not. It may be presumed, then,
that Rivermouth's proper quota of dead bodies
was washed ashore during the ensuing two
months. There had been gales off the coast and
pleasure parties on the river, and between them
they had managed to do a ghastly business. But
Mr. O'Rouke failed to appear among the flotsam
and jetsam which the receding tides left tangled
in the piles of the Rivermouth wharves. This
convinced Margaret that Larry had proved a too
tempting morsel to some buccaneering shark, or
schools of fish which seem to have a yearly
appointment with the fishermen on this coast.
From that day Margaret never saw a cod or a
mackerel brought into the house without an involuntary
shudder. She averted her head in
making up the fish-balls, as if she half dreaded
to detect a faint aroma of whiskey about them.
And, indeed, why might not a man fall into the
sea, be eaten, say, by a halibut, and reappear on
the scene of his earthly triumphs and defeats in
the non-committal form of hashed fish?
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
't were to consider too curiously to consider
so.
Mr. Bilkins had come to adopt Margaret's explanation
of O'Rouke's disappearance. He was
undoubtedly drowned, had most likely drowned
himself. The hat picked up on the wharf was
strong circumstantial evidence in that direction.
But one feature of the case staggered Mr. Bilkins.
O'Rouke's violin had also disappeared.
Now, it required no great effort to imagine a man
of mania à potu; but it was difficult to conceive
of a man committing violinicide! If the fellow
went to drown himself, why did he take his fiddle
with him? He might as well have taken an
umbrella or a German student-lamp. This question
troubled Mr. Bilkins a good deal first and
last. But one thing was indisputable: the man
was gone,—and had evidently gone by water.
It was now that Margaret invested her husband
with charms of mind and person not calculated
to make him recognizable by any one who
had ever had the privilege of knowing him in the
faulty flesh. She eliminated all his bad qualities,
and projected from her imagination a Mr.
O'Rouke as he ought to have been,—a species
of seraphic being mixed up in some way with a
violin; and to this ideal she erected a headstone
in the suburban cemetery. If Mr. O'Rouke could
have read the inscription, he would never have
suspected his own complicity in the matter.
But there the marble stood, sacred to his
memory; and soon the snow came down from
the gray sky and covered it, and the invisible
snow of weeks and months drifted down on
smoothed off the sharp angles of its grief; and
there was peace upon it.
Not but she sorrowed for Larry at times. But
life had a relish to it again; she was free, though
she did not look at it in that light; she was happier
in a quiet fashion than she had ever been,
though she would not have acknowledged it to
herself. She wondered that she had the heart to
laugh when the ice-man made love to her. Perhaps
she was conscious of something comically
incongruous in the warmth of a gentleman who
spent all winter in cutting ice, and all summer
in dealing it out to his customers. She had not
the same excuse for laughing at the baker; yet
she laughed still more merrily at him when he
pressed her hand over the steaming loaf of brown-bread,
delivered every Saturday morning at the
scullery door. Both these gentlemen had known
Margaret many years, yet neither of them had
valued her very highly until another man came
along and married her. A widow, it would appear,
is esteemed in some sort as a warranted
article, being stamped with the maker's name.
There was even a third lover in prospect; for
was frequently to be seen of a Sunday
afternoon standing in the cemetery and regarding
Mr. O'Rouke's headstone with unrestrained
satisfaction.
A year had passed away, and certain bits of
color blossoming among Margaret's weeds indicated
that the winter of her mourning was
over. The ice-man and the baker were hating
each other cordially, and Mrs. Bilkins was daily
expecting it would be discovered before night
that Margaret had married one or both of them.
But to do Margaret justice, she was faithful in
thought and deed to the memory of O'Rouke,
— not the O'Rouke who disappeared so strangely,
but the O'Rouke who never existed.
“D'ye think, mum,” she said one day to Mrs.
Bilkins, as that lady was adroitly sounding her
on the ice question,—“d'ye think I'd condescind
to take up wid the likes o'him, or the baker
either, afther sich a man as Larry?”
The rectified and clarified O'Rouke was a permanent
wonder to Mr. Bilkins, who bore up
under the bereavement with remarkable resignation.
“Peggy is right,” said the old gentleman,
who was superintending the burning out of the
kitchen flue. “She won't find another man
like Larry O'Rouke, in a hurry.”
“Thrue for ye, Mr. Bilkins,” answered Margaret.
“Maybe there's as good fish in the say
as iver was caught, but I don't belave it all the
same.”
As good fish in the sea! The words recalled
to Margaret the nature of her loss, and she went
on with her work in silence.
“What — what is it, Ezra?” cried Mrs. Bilkins,
changing color, and rising hastily from
the breakfast-table. Her first thought was apoplexy.
There sat Mr. Bilkins, with his wig pushed
back from his forehead, and his eyes fixed vacantly
on The Weekly Chronicle, which he held
out at arm's length before him.
“Good heavens, Ezra! what is the matter?”
Mr. Bilkins turned his eyes upon her mechanically,
as if he were a great wax-doll, and somebody
had pulled his wire.
“Can't you speak, Ezra?”
His lips opened, and moved inarticulately;
then he pointed a rigid finger, in the manner of
a guide-board, at a paragraph in the paper, which
he held up for Mrs. Bilkins to read over his
shoulder. When she had read it she sunk back
into her chair without a word, and the two sat
contemplating each other as if they had never
met before in this world, and were not overpleased
at meeting.
The paragraph which produced this singular
effect on the aged couple occurred at the end of
a column of telegraph despatches giving the details
of an unimportant engagement that had just
taken place between one of the blockading squadron
and a Confederate cruiser. The engagement
itself does not concern us, but this item from the
list of casualties on the Union side has a direct
bearing on our narative: —
“Larry O'Rouke, seaman, splinter wound in
the leg. Not serious.”
That splinter flew far. It glanced from Mr.
O'Rouke's leg, went plumb through the Bilkins
mansion, and knocked over a small marble slab
in the Old South Burying-Ground.
If a ghost had dropped in familiarly to breakfast,
family could not have been greater. How
was the astounding intelligence to be broken to
Margaret? Her explosive Irish nature made the
task one of extreme delicacy. Mrs. Bilkins flatly
declared herself incapable of undertaking it. Mr.
Bilkins, with many misgivings as to his fitness,
assumed the duty; for it would never do to have
the news sprung upon Margaret suddenly by
people outside.
As Mrs. O'Rouke was clearing away the breakfast
things, Mr. Bilkins, who had lingered near
the window with the newspaper in his hand,
coughed once or twice in an unnatural way to
show that he was not embarrassed, and began to
think that maybe it would be best to tell Margaret
after dinner. Mrs. Bilkins fathomed his
thought with that intuition which renders women
terrible, and sent across the room an eye-telegram
to this effect, “Now is your time.”
“There's been another battle down South,
Margaret,” said the old gentleman presently,
folding up the paper and putting it in his pocket.
“A sea-fight this time.”
“Sure, an' they're allus fightin' down there.”
“But not always with so little damage. There
was only one man wounded on our side.”
“Pore man! It's sorry we oughter be for his
wife an' childer, if he's got any.”
“Not badly wounded, you will understand,
Margaret; not at all seriously wounded; only a
splinter in the leg.”
“Faith, thin, a splinter in the leg is no pleasant
thing in itself.”
“A mere scratch,” said Mr. Bilkins lightly, as
if he were constantly in the habit of going about
with a splinter in his own leg, and found it rather
agreeable. “The odd part of the matter is the
man's first name. His first name was Larry.”
Margaret nodded, as one should say, There's
a many Larrys in the world.
“But the oddest part of it,” continued Mr.
Bilkins, in a carelessly sepulchral voice, “is the
man's last name.”
Something in the tone of his voice made Margaret
look at him, and something in the expression
of his face caused the blood to fly from Margaret's
cheek.
“The man's last name,” she repeated, wonderingly.
“Yes, his last name, — O'Rouke.”
“D' ye mane it?” shrieked Margaret, — “d'
ye mane it? Glory to God! O worra! worra!”
“Well, Ezra,” said Mrs. Bilkins, in one of
those spasms of base ingratitude to which even
the most perfect women are liable, “you 've made
nice work of it. You might as well have knocked
her down with an axe!”
“But, my dear — ”
“O bother! — my smelling-bottle, quick! —
second bureau drawer, — left-hand side.”
Joy never kills; it is a celestial kind of hydrogen
of which it seems impossible to get too
much at one inhalation. In an hour Margaret
was able to converse with comparative calmness
on the resuscitation of Larry O'Rouke, whom
the firing of a cannon had brought to the surface
as if he had been in reality a drowned
body.
Now that the whole town was aware of Mr.
O'Rouke's fate, his friend Mr. Donnehugh came
forward with a statement that would have been
of some interest at an earlier period, but was of
no service as matters stood, except so far as it
assisted in removing from Mr. Bilkins's mind a
of the telegraphic reports was Margaret's scapegrace
of a husband. Mr. Donnehugh had known
all along that O'Rouke had absconded to Boston
by a night train and enlisted in the navy. It
was the possession of this knowledge that had
made it impossible for Mr. Donnehugh to look at
Mr. O'Rouke's gravestone without grinning.
At Margaret's request, and in Margaret's
name, Mr. Bilkins wrote three or four letters to
O'Rouke, and finally succeeded in extorting an
epistle from that gentleman, in which he told
Margaret to cheer up, that his fortune was as
good as made, and that the day would come
when she should ride through the town in her
own coach, and no thanks to old flint-head, who
pretended to be so fond of her. Mr. Bilkins tried
to conjecture who was meant by old flint-head,
but was obliged to give it up. Mr. O'Rouke
furthermore informed Margaret that he had three
hundred dollars prize-money coming to him, and
broadly intimated that when he got home he
intended to have one of the most extensive blowouts
ever witnessed in Rivermouth.
“Oche!” laughed Margaret, “that's jist Larry
nonsense an' spirits.”
“That he was,” said Mr. Bilkins, dryly.
Content with the fact that her husband was in
the land of the living, Margaret gave herself
no trouble over the separation. O'Rouke had
shipped for three years; one third of his term of
service was past, and two years more, God willing,
would see him home again. This was Margaret's
view of it. Mr. Bilkins's view of it was
not so cheerful. The prospect of Mr. O'Rouke's
ultimate return was anything but enchanting.
Mr. Bilkins was by no means disposed to kill the
fatted calf. He would much rather have killed
the Prodigal Son. However, there was always
this chance: he might never come back.
The tides rose and fell at the Rivermouth
wharves; the summer moonlight and the winter
snow, in turn, bleached its quiet streets; and
the two years had nearly gone by. In the
mean time nothing had been heard of O'Rouke.
If he ever received the five or six letters sent
to him, he did not fatigue himself by answering
them.
“Larry 's all right,” said hopeful Margaret.
have knowed it. It's the bad news that travels
fast.”
Mr. Bilkins was not so positive about that. It
had taken a whole year to find out that O'Rouke
had not drowned himself.
The period of Mr. O'Rouke's enlistment had
come to an end. Two months slipped by, and
he had neglected to brighten Rivermouth with
his presence. There were many things that
might have detained him, difficulties in getting
his prize-papers or in drawing his pay; but there
was no reason why he might not have written.
The days were beginning to grow long to Margaret,
and vague forebodings of misfortune possessed
her.
Perhaps we had better look up Mr. O'Rouke.
He had seen some rough times, during those
three years, and some harder work than catching
cunners at the foot of Anchor Street, or setting
out crocuses in Mr. Bilkins's back garden. He
had seen battles and shipwreck, and death in
many guises; but they had taught him nothing,
as the sequel will show. With his active career
in the navy we shall not trouble ourselves; we
of his term of service.
Several months before, he had been transferred
from the blockading squadron to a gun-boat attached
to the fleet operating against the forts defending
New Orleans. The forts had fallen, the
fleet had passed on to the city, and Mr. O'Rouke's
ship lay off in the stream, binding up her wounds.
In three days he would receive his discharge, and
the papers entitling him to a handsome amount
of prize-money in addition to his pay. With
noble contempt for so much good fortune, Mr.
O'Rouke dropped over the bows of the gun-boat
one evening and managed to reach the levee.
In the city he fell in with some soldiers, and,
being of a convivial nature, caroused with them
that night, and next day enlisted in a cavalry
regiment.
Desertion in the face of the enemy — for
though the city lay under Federal guns, it was
still hostile enough — involved the heaviest penalties.
O'Rouke was speedily arrested with other
deserters, tried by court-martial, and sentenced
to death.
The intelligence burst like a shell upon the
for the sound of Larry O'Rouke's footstep on the
threshold. It was a heavy load for Margaret to
bear, after all those years of patient vigil. But
the load was to be lightened for her. In consideration
of O'Rouke's long service, and in view
of the fact that his desertion so near the expiration
of his time was an absurdity, the Good President
commuted his sentence to imprisonment
for life, with loss of prize-money and back pay.
Mr. O'Rouke was despatched North, and placed
in Moyamensing Prison.
If joy could kill, Margaret would have been a
dead woman the day these tidings reached Rivermonth;
and Mr. Bilkins himself would have been
in a critical condition, for, though he did not
want O'Rouke shot or hanged, he was delighted
to have him permanently shelved.
After the excitement was over, and this is
always the trying time, Margaret accepted the
situation philosophically.
“The pore lad's out o' harum's rache, any
way,” she reflected. “He can't be gittin' into
hot wather now, and that's a fact. And maybe
after awhiles they'll let him go agin. They
Larry's done no hurt to nobody but hisself.”
Margaret was inclined to be rather severe on
President Lincoln for taking away Larry's prize-money.
The impression was strong on her
mind that the money went into Mr. Lincoln's
private exchequer.
“I would n't wonder if Misthress Lincoln had
a new silk gownd or two this fall,” Margaret
would remark, sarcastically.
The prison rules permitted Mr. O'Rouke to receive
periodical communications from his friends
outside. Once every quarter Mr. Bilkins wrote
him a letter, and in the interim Margaret kept
him supplied with those doleful popular ballads,
printed on broadsides, which one sees pinned up
for sale on the iron railings of city churchyards,
and seldom anywhere else. They seem the natural
exhalations of the mould and pathos of
such places, but we have a suspicion that they
are written by sentimental young undertakers.
Though these songs must have been a solace to
Mr. O'Rouke in his captivity, he never so far
forgot himself as to acknowledge their receipt.
It was only through the kindly chaplain of the
of the well-being of her husband.
Towards the close of that year the great
O'Rouke himself did condescend to write one
letter. As this letter has never been printed,
and as it is the only specimen extant of Mr.
O'Rouke's epistolary manner, we lay it before
the reader verbatim et literatim:—
febuary. 1864
mi belovid wife
fur the luv of God sind mee pop gose
the wezel. yours till deth
larry O rouke
“Pop goes the Weasel” was sent to him, and
Mr. Bilkins ingeniously slipped into the same
envelope “Beware of the Bowl,” and “The
Drunkard's Death,” two spirited compositions
well calculated to exert a salutary influence over
a man imprisoned for life.
There is nothing in this earthly existence so
uncertain as what seems to be a certainty. To
all appearances, the world outside of Moyamensing
Prison was forever a closed book to O'Rouke.
But the Southern Confederacy collapsed, the General
Amnesty Proclamation was issued, cell doors
were thrown open; and one afternoon Mr. Larry
into the Bilkins kitchen and frightened Margaret
nearly out of her skin.
Mr. O'Rouke's summing up of his case was
characteristic: “I've bin kilt in battle, hanged
by the coort-martial, put into the lock-up for life,
and here I am, bedad, not a ha'p'orth the worse
for it.”
None the worse for it, certainly, and none the
better. By no stretch of magical fiction can we
make an angel of him. He is not at all the
material for an apotheosis. It was not for him
to reform and settle down, and become a respectable,
oppressed tax-payer. His conduct in Rivermouth,
after his return, was a repetition of his
old ways. Margaret all but broke down under
the tests to which he put her affections, and
came at last to wish that Larry had never got
out of Moyamensing Prison.
If any change had taken place in Mr. O'Rouke,
it showed itself in occasional fits of sullenness
towards Margaret. It was in one of these moods
that he slouched his hat over his brows, and told
her she need n't wait dinner for him.
It will be a cold dinner, if Margaret has kept
day, and O'Rouke has not come home.
Possibly he is off on a whaling voyage; possibly
the swift maelstrom has dragged him down;
perhaps he is lifting his hand to knock at the
door of the Bilkins mansion as we pen these
words. But Margaret does not watch for him
impatiently any more. There are strands of gray
in her black hair. She has had her romance.
| III. Marjorie Daw, and other people | |