University of Virginia Library

23. CHAPTER XXIII.

William Hinkley ascended the narrow path leading to
the hills with an alacrity of heart which somewhat surprised
himself. The apprehensions of danger, if he felt
any, were not of a kind to distress or annoy him, and were
more than balanced by the conviction that he had brought his
enemy within his level. That feeling of power is indeed a
very consolatory one. It satisfies the ambitious heart, though
death preys upon his household, one by one; though suffering
fevers his sleep; though the hopes of his affection
wither; though the loves and ties of his youth decay and
vanish. It makes him careless of the sunshine, and heedless
of the storm. It deadens his ear to the song of birds,
it blinds his eye to the seduction of flowers. It makes him
fly from friendship and rush on hate. It compensates for
all sorts of loneliness, and it produces them. It is a princely
despotism; which, while it robs its slave of freedom, covers
him with other gifts which he learns to value more;—which
binding him in fetters makes him believe that they are sceptres
and symbols before which all things become what he
desires them. His speech is changed, his very nature perverted,
but he acquires an “open sesame” by their loss, and
the loss seems to his imagination an exceeding gain. We
will not say that William Hinkley was altogether satisfied
with his bargain, but in the moment when he stood confronting
his enemy on the bald rock, with a deadly weapon
in each hand—when he felt that he stood foot to foot in
equal conflict with his foe, one whom he had dragged
down from his pride of place, and had compelled to the
fearful issue which made his arrogance quail—in that moment,
if he did not forget, he did not so much feel that he
had lost family and friends, parents and love; and if he

felt, it was only to induce that heavier feeling of revenge
in which even the affections are apt to be swallowed up.

Stevens looked in the eye of the young man and saw
that he was dangerous. He looked upon the ante-revolutionary
pistols, and saw that they were dangerous too, in a
double sense.

“Here are pistols,” he said, “better suited to our purpose.
You can sound them and take your choice.”

“These,” said Hinkley, doggedly, “are as well suited
as any. If you will, you can take your choice of mine;
but if you think yours superior, use them. These are
good enough for me.”

“But this is out of all usage,” said Stevens.

“What matters it, Mr. Stevens? If you are satisfied that
yours are the best, the advantage is with you. If you
doubt that mine can kill, try them. I have a faith in these
pistols which will content me; but we will take one of
each, if that will please you better, and use which we think
proper.”

Stevens expressed himself better pleased to keep his
own.

“Suit yourself as to distance,” said Hinkley, with all
the coolness of an unmixed salamander. His opponent
stepped off ten paces with great deliberation, and William
Hinkley, moving towards a fragment of rock upon which
he had placed his “revolutions” for the better inspection of
his opponent, possessed himself of the veterans and prepared
to take the station which had been assigned him.

“Who shall give the word?” demanded Stevens.

“You may!” was the cool rejoinder.

“If I do, I kill you,” said the other.

“I have no fear, Mr. Stevens,” answered William Hinkley
with a degree of phlegm which almost led Stevens to
fancy he had to deal with a regular Trojan—“I have no
fear,” he continued, “and if you fancy you can frighten
me by this sort of bragging you have very much mistaken
your man. Shoot when you please, word or no word.”

William Hinkley stood with his back to the woods, his
face towards the lake which spread itself, smooth and calm,
at a little distance. He did not perceive that his position
was a disadvantageous one. The tree behind, and that
beside him, rendered his body a most conspicuous mark;

while his opponent, standing with his back to the uncovered
rocks ranged with no other objects of any prominence.
Had he even been sufficiently practised in the arts
of the duello, he would most probably have been utterly
regardless of these things. They would not have influenced
his firmness in the slightest degree. His course was quite
as much the result of desperation as philosophy. He felt
himself an outcast as well from home as from love, and it
mattered to him very little, in the morbid excitement of his
present mind, whether he fell by the hand of his rival, or
lived to pine out a wearisome existence, lonely and uninspired,
a gloomy exile in the bitter world. He waited, it
may be said, with some impatience for the fire of his antagonist.
Once he saw the pistol of Stevens uplifted. He
had one in each hand. His own hung beside him. He
waited for the shot of the enemy as a signal when to lift
and use his own weapon. But instead of this he was surprised
to see him drop the muzzle of his weapon, and with
some celerity and no small degree of slight of hand, thrust
the two pistols behind his coat-skirts. A buz reached his ears
a moment after—the hum of voices,—some rustling in the
bushes, which signified confusion in the approach of
strangers. He did not wish to look round as he preferred
keeping his eye on his antagonist.

“Shoot!” he exclaimed—“quickly, before we are interrupted.”

Before he could receive answer there was a rush behind
him—he heard his father's voice, sudden, and in a high
degree of fury, mingled with that of his mother and Mr.
Calvert, as if in expostulation. From the latter the words
distinctly reached his ears, warning him to beware. Such,
also, was the purport of his mother's cry. Before he could
turn and guard against the unseen danger, he received a
blow upon his head, the only thing of which he was conscious
for some time. He staggered and fell forward. He
felt himself stunned, fancied that he was shot, and sunk to
the ground in an utter state of insensibility.

The blow came from his father's crab-stick. It was so
utterly unexpected by the parties who had attended old
Hinkley to the place of meeting, that no efforts were made
to prevent it. But the mother of the victim rushed in in
time to defeat the second blow, which the father prepared
to inflict, in the moment when his son was falling from the

effects of the first. Grasping the coat-skirts of her spouse,
she pulled him back with no scrupulous hand, and effectually
baffled his design by bringing him down, though in
an opposite direction, to the same level with the youth.
Old Hinkley did not bite the dust, but the latter part of his
skull most effectually butted it; and had not his head been
quite as tough as his crab-stick, the hurt might have been
quite as severe as that which the latter had inflicted on the
son's. The latter lay as perfectly quiet as if all had been
over with him. So much so, that the impression became
very general that such was the case. Under this impression
the heart of the mother spoke out in mingled screams
of lamentation and reproach. She threw herself down by
the side of the youth and vainly attempted to stop the
blood which was streaming from a deep gash on his skull.
While engaged in this work, her apron and handkerchief
being both employed for this purpose, she poured forth a
torrent of wrath and denunciation against her spouse. She
now forgot all the offences of the boy, and even Alfred
Stevens came in for his share of the objurgation with which
she visited the offence and the offender.

“Shame! shame! you bloody-minded man,” she cried,
“to slaughter your own son,—your only son—to come
behind him and knock him down with a club as if he had
been an inhuman ox! You are no husband of mine. He
shan't own you for a father. If I had the pick, I'd choose
a thousand fathers for him, from here to Massassippi,
sooner than you. He's only too good and too handsome
to be son of yours. And for what should you strike him?
For a stranger—a man we never saw before. Shame on
you! You are a brute, a monster, William Hinkley, and
I'm done with you for ever.

“My poor, poor boy! Look up, my son. Look up,
William. Open your eyes. It's your own dear mother
that speaks to you. Oh! my God! you've killed him—
he will not open his eyes. He's dead, he's dead, he's
dead!”

And truly it seemed so, for the youth gave no sign of
consciousness. She threw herself in a screaming agony
upon his body, and gave herself up to the unmeasured despair,
which, if a weakness, is at least a sacred one in the
case of a mother mourning her only son. Old Hinkley
was not without his alarms—nay, not altogether without

his compunctions. But he was one of that round head
genus whose self-esteem is too much at all times for fear,
or shame, or sensibility. Without seeking to assist the
lad, and ascertain what was his real condition, he sought
only to justify himself for what he had done by repeating
the real and supposed offences of the youth. He addressed
himself in this labour chiefly to Mr. Calvert, who, with
quite as much suffering as any of the rest, had more consideration,
and was now busied in the endeavour to staunch
the blood and cleanse the wound of the victim.

“He's got only what he deserved,” exclaimed the sullen,
stubborn father.

“Do not speak so, Mr. Hinkley,” replied Calvert, with
a sternness which was unusual with him; “your son may
have got his death.”

“And he deserves it!” responded the other doggedly.

“And if he has,” continued Calvert, “you are a murderer—a
cold-blooded murderer, and as such will merit
and will meet the halter.”

The face of the old man grew livid—his lips whitened
with rage; and he approached Calvert, his whole frame
quivering with fury, and shaking his hand threateningly,
exclaimed—

“Do you dare to speak to me in this manner, you miserable,
white-headed pedagogue—do you dare?”

“Dare!” retorted Calvert, rising to his feet with a look
of majesty which, in an instant, awed the insolence of the
offender. Never had he been faced by such defiance, so
fearlessly and nobly expressed.

“Dare!—Look on me, and ask yourself whether I dare
or not. Approach me but a step nigher, and even my
love for your unfortunate, and much abused, but well-minded
son, will not protect you. I would chastise you,
with all my years upon me, in spite of my white head.
Yours, if this boy should die, will never become white, or
will become so suddenly, as your soul will wither, with
its own self-torture, within you. Begone!—keep back—
do not approach me, and, above all, do not approach me
with uplifted hand, or by Heaven, I will fell you to the
earth as surely as you felled this boy. You have roused
a feeling within me, William Hinkley, which has slept
for years. Do not provoke it too far. Beware in season.
You have acted the brute and the coward to your son—

you could do so with impunity to him—to me you cannot.”

There was something in this speech, from one whom
old Hinkley was accustomed to look upon as a dreaming
book-worm, which goaded the tyrannical father into irrepressible
fury, and grinding his teeth, without a moment's
hesitation he advanced, and was actually about to lay the
crab-stick over the shoulders of the speaker; but the latter
was as prompt as he was fearless. Before Hinkley could
conceive his intention, he had leapt over the still unconscious
person of William, and flinging the old man round
with a sudden jerk had grasped and wrested the stick
from his hands with a degree of activity and strength
which confounded all the bystanders, and the subject of
his sudden exercise of manhood no less than the rest.

“Were you treated justly,” said Calvert, regarding
him with a look of the loftiest indignation, “you should
yourself receive a taste of the cudgel you are so free to use
on others. Let your feebleness, old man, be a warning to
your arrogance.”

With these words he flung the crab-stick into the lake,
old Hinkley regarding him with looks in which it was
difficult to say whether mortification or fury had preponderance.

“Go,” he continued, “your son lives; but it is God's
mercy and none of yours which has spared his life. You
will live, I hope, to repent of your cruelty and injustice to
him. To repent of having shown a preference to a stranger
so blind as that which has moved you to attempt the
life of one of the most gentle lads in the whole country.”

“And did he not come here to murder the stranger?
Did we not find him even now with pistol ready to murder
Brother Stevens? See, the pistols now in his hands—
my father's pistols. We came not a minute too soon.
But for my blow, he had been a murderer.”

Such was the justification which old Hinkley now offered
for what he had done.

“I am no advocate for duelling,” said Calvert, “but I
believe that your son came with the stranger for this purpose,
and not to murder him.”

“No! no! do you not see that Brother Stevens has no
pistols? Did we not see him trying to escape—walking
off—walking almost over the rocks to get out of the way?”

Calvert comprehended the matter much more clearly.

“Speak, sir,” he said to Stevens, “did you not come
prepared to defend yourself?”

“You see me as I am,” said Stevens, showing his empty
hands.

Calvert looked at him with searching eye.

“I understand you, sir,” he said, with an expression
not to be mistaken. “I understand you now. This lad
I know. He could not be a murderer. He could not
take any man at advantage. If you do not know the
fact, Mr. Stevens, I can assure you that your life was perfectly
secure from his weapon, so long as his remained
equally unendangered. The sight of that lake from which
he rescued you but a few days ago, should sufficiently
have persuaded you of this.”

Stevens muttered something, the purport of which was,
that “he did not believe the young man intended to murder
him.”

“Did he not send you a challenge?”

“No!” said old Hinkley—“he sent him a begging
note, promising atonement and repentance.”

“Will you let me see that note?” said Calvert, addressing
Stevens.

“I have it not—I destroyed it,” said Stevens with some
haste. Calvert said no more, but he looked plainly enough
his suspicions. He now gave his attention to William
Hinkley, whose mother, while this scene was in progress,
had been occupied, as Calvert had begun, in staunching
the blood, and trimming, with her scissors, which were
fortunately at her girdle, the hair from the wound. The
son meanwhile had wakened to consciousness. He had
been stunned but not severely injured by the blow, and
with the promptitude of a border dame, Mrs. Hinkley,
hurrying to a pine tree, had gathered enough of its resin,
which, spread upon a fragment of her cotton apron, and
applied to the hurt, proved a very fair substitute for adhesive
plaister. The youth rose to his feet still retaining
the pistols in his grasp. His looks were heavy from the
stupor which still continued; but kindled into instant intelligence
when he caught sight of Stevens and his father.

“Go home, sir,” said the latter, waving his hand in the
prescribed direction.

“Never!” was the reply of the young man, firmly expressed.
“Never, sir! if I never have a home.”

“You shall always have a home, William, while I have
one,” said Mr. Calvert.

“What! you encourage my son in rebellion—you teach
him to fly in the face of his father?” shouted the old man.

“No, sir; I only offer him a shelter from tyranny, a
place of refuge from persecution. When you learn the
duties and the feelings of a father, it will be time enough
to assert the rights of one. I do not think him safe in
your house against your vindictiveness and brutality. He
is, however, of full age, and will can determine for himself.”

“He is not of age, and will not be till July.”

“It matters not. He is more near the years of discretion
than his father, and judging him to be in some danger
in your house, as a man and as a magistrate, I offer him
the protection of mine. Come home with me, William.”

“Let him go, if he pleases—go to the d—l! He who
honours not his father, says the Scriptures—what says the
passage, Brother Stevens—doth it not say that he who
honours not his father is in danger of hell-fire?”

“Not exactly, I believe,” said the other.

“Matters not, matters not!—the meaning is very much
the same.”

“Oh, my son,” said the mother, clinging to his neck,
“will you, indeed, desert me—can you leave me in my
old age? I have none, none but you. You know how I
have loved—you know I will always love you.”

“And I love you, mother—and love him too—though
he treats me as an outcast—I will always love you, but I
will never more enter my father's dwelling. He has degraded
me with his whip—he has attempted my life with
his bludgeon. I forgive him, but will never expose myself
again to his cruelties or indignities. You will always
find me a son, and a dutiful one, in all other respects.”

He turned away with Mr. Calvert, and slowly proceeded
down the pathway by which he had approached
the eminence. He gave Stevens a significant look as he
passed him, and lifted one of the pistols which he still
carried in his hands, in a manner to make evident his
meaning. The other smiled and turned off with the group,
who proceeded by the route along the hills, but the last

words of the mother, subdued by sobs, still came to the
ears of the youth—

“Oh, my son, come home! come home!”

“No! no! I have no home—no home, mother!” muttered
the young man, as if he thought the half-stifled response
could reach the ears of the complaining woman.

“No home! no hope!” he continued—“I am desolate.”

“Not so, my son. God is our home; God is our companion;
our strength, our preserver! Living and loving,
manfully striving and working out our toils for deliverance,
we are neither homeless, nor hopeless; neither strengthless,
nor fatherless; wanting neither in substance or companion.
This is a sharp lesson, perhaps, but a necessary
one. It will give you that courage, of the great value of
which I spoke to you but a few days ago. Come with
me to my home; it shall be yours until you can find a
better.”

“I thank you—oh! how much I thank you. It may
be all as you say, but I feel very, very miserable.”