 | CHAPTER VIII.
GUILT, AND ITS VICTIM. The kinsmen, or, The black riders of Congaree |  |
8. CHAPTER VIII.
GUILT, AND ITS VICTIM.
The course of the surgeon, when he left the chamber
of the outlaw, naturally tended to the apartment of his
other patient. The indignation which he felt at the conduct
of Morton, in rejecting, in terms of such contempt,
his counsel to silence; expedited his movements, and,
muttering while he went, the discomfiture which he felt,
he found himself in the presence of Miss Middleton before
he had entirely smoothed his ruffled front for such
a meeting. But Mr. Hillhouse prided himself on his
possession of all those nice requisites which constitute,
par excellence, the ladies-man. Among these may be
reckoned a countenance which no unruly passions
could ever discompose. He started with an air of studied,
theatrical modesty, when, at the entrance of the chamber,
he saw the young lady;—passed his kerchief once
over his face, and the magic consequences of such a
proceeding, were instantly apparent. The wrinkles and
frowns had all disappeared, and sweet sentiment and
deliberate love alone appeared upon that territory which
they had unbecomingly usurped. The surgeon approached
trippingly, and in a half whisper to Flora,
communicated his apologies.
“I still tremble, Miss Middleton, for I had almost
ventured into your presence with an angry visage. The
truth is, I am sometimes susceptible of anger. My
patient in the opposite apartment proves to be unruly.
He has annoyed me. He rejects good counsel, and he
Miss Middleton, has been happily designated, the physic
of the soul, and can never be rejected—”
“Except when given as physic, sir,—but will you
look at this poor young woman; I am afraid you can
do but little for her. She grows worse every moment.”
“A-hem!—The limit to human art has not yet been
found, Miss Middleton. The patient has frequently
been rescued from the very fingers of death. My own
successes in this respect have been numerous and remarkable.
I remember once in Ceylon, some time in
the autumn of 1772, I had a case of this very sort, and
a young woman too. She fractured her skull by falling
from a window, in an effort to reach her lover. The
affair occasioned no little sensation at the time. The
parties were something more than respectable on all
sides; but an unconquerable aversion to her lover
which her father entertained, threatened to defeat their
desires. You need not be told, Miss Middleton, that
where a young woman loves, she will do any thing to
secure the object of her attachment. He was worthy of
her. He was an Irishman, his name Macartney,—and
certainly, for that day, had the most inimitable taste in
the arrangement of his cravat, of any man I ever knew.
He could make a pendant to it, a sort of n\œud Gordienne,
which I would defy the prettiest fingers in the
world to unravel. The knot appeared like a ball, a
single globe, from which hung two lappets, being the
open ends of the kerchief. Sometimes, with singular
ingenuity, he would alter the design so as to leave but
one lappet, and then, it might be likened to a comet,
with a tail,—such an one as I saw at Paris, in 1769. I
doubt if you were then quite old enough to have seen that
comet, but you may have heard of it. It had a most
prodigious tail—fully sixty degrees in length, as computed
by the astronomers.”
It was with a degree of disgust, almost amounting to
loathing, that Flora Middleton listened to the stuff of the
voluble exquisite, poured forth all the while that he pursued
his examination into the hurts of his patient. It
on any subject but such as was essential to the
successful performance of the task in hand; but that he
should enlarge on such wretched follies, with so much
suffering before his eyes, seemed to her still more
shocking, strange, and unnatural. It will be remembered
that Flora Middleton was a country girl, to whom
the resources and employments of the conventional
world of fashion, were almost entirely unknown, except
from books; and if she heard any thing of such extravagancies
in them, they were very likely to be thrown
by, as too silly for perusal, and too idle for belief. The
plaintive moans and occasional ejaculations of the poor
girl offered the only interruption to the garrulity of the
surgeon, but did not seem to awaken any feeling. He
commented on this insensibility, by a quotation from
Shakspeare, which served for the time to divert him
entirely from the subject.
“`How use doth breed a habit in a man!' I do believe,
Miss Middleton, though I should think just as
much of her as before, and feel just as desirous of doing
her a service, that I could take off the leg of my grandmother
with as much composure and indifference, as
perform on the most indifferent stranger. Did you ever
have a tooth drawn, Miss Middleton?”
He urged this question with great gravity, but did not
wait for the answer.
“A painful operation to the patient, decidedly, and
the only surgical operation which I have any reluctance
to perform. My objection arose from a very rational
circumstance. When in my teens, and a student—a
time as you perceive not very remote, Miss Middleton,
though my worldly experience has been so extensive
and so rapid—I was called upon to extract a tooth from
the mouth of a young lady, the daughter of a singing-master
in Bath. She was very nervous, and gave me
a great deal of trouble to get her to submit. But I had
scarcely got my finger into her mouth,—being about to
use the lancet,—when—look what a mark!”—showing
his finger—“it will last me to my grave, and, as you
her jaw upon me, and—ah! I feel the thrill of horror
even now, which seemed to run through my whole
system. Nay, by my faith, would you think it,—not
content with taking hold, she seemed no way disposed
to let go again, and it was only by main force that she
was persuaded to recollect that my finger had no real
or natural connection with her incisors. Young ladies
are said to keep possession of their favourites with a
tenacity peculiar to themselves, but a mode like this,
Miss Middleton, you will readily admit, was neither
loving nor ladylike.”
As she looked and listened, Flora could scarce forbear
the exclamation of “unfeeling fool;” while the
reflection which has occurred to every mind which has
ever observed and thought, suggested to hers the strong
identity which exists between the extremely callous and
cold nature, and that in which levity seems a leading
characteristic. The extremes inevitably meet. The
bear can dance, and the monkey, which is one of the
most sportive, if not the most formidable, is one of the
most malignant of the wild tribes of the forest. A
frivolous people is apt to be a savage people, and the
most desperate Indian warriors prefer the looking-glass
worn about their necks to any other ornament. While
the surgeon was prating in this fashion he was extorting
groans from the poor girl whose hurts he examined
without seeming to hear their utterance; and the finger
which he presented for examination as that which had
so much suffered from the jaws of the lady of Bath, was
touched with the crimson hues from the fractured skull
which he had been feeling. Mr. Hillhouse was considered
a good surgeon in the British army—and, it
may be, that the very callosity which shocked the sensibilities
of Flora Middleton, would not only commend
him to the rough soldier, who acquires from his daily
practice, an habitual scorn of the more becoming humanities,
but was, indeed, one cause of his being an
excellent operator. His skill, however, promised to
avail nothing in behalf of his female patient; and when,
him his final opinion, though it said nothing, it signified
much. The mournful presentiments of the poor girl,
expressed to her betrayer but a few days before, promised
to be soon realized. Her wounds, mental and
bodily, were mortal. Her mind was gone. Her body
was sinking fast. The seat of reason was usurped by
its worst foe; and delirium raved with unabashed front
and undisputed presence, over the abandoned empire of
thought. Wild and wretched, were the strange and
incoherent expressions which fell from her lips. Now
she spoke of her childhood—now of her father,—and
when she spoke of him her eyes would unclose and
shudderingly steal a hasty glance for a few moments
around the chamber—meeting the gaze of Flora Middleton,
they would suddenly turn aside, or fold themselves
up again, as if anxious to exclude a painful object
from their survey. But there was one name which,
like the keynote in an elaborate strain of artificial music,
sounds ever prelusive to the rest; and the keen ear
of Flora heard with surprise the frequent iteration, in
tones of the most touching tenderness and entreaty, of
the name of Edward. Never even did the listener conjecture
to whom this name applied. It was the name
of the father, perhaps the brother, the dear friend; but
never once did she fancy the true relation which made
it dear, and fatal as it was dear, to the unhappy victim.
Could she have guessed the truth,—could she have
dreamed, or in any way been led to a prescience of the
truth, how would that suffering, but proud heart, have
melted at the stern cruelty which its injustice was momently
doing to the faithful but absent lover. Her
meditations were those of the unsophisticated and puresouled
woman.
“I will not let her suffer,” she murmured to herself
while she sat beside the dying creature. “I will not
let her suffer, though, poor victim, she little fancies how
much suffering her presence brings to me. Her miserable
fall, and wretched fortunes, shall not make her
feelings, and strengthen me against temptation. Let
me treat her kindly, and not remember to her detriment,
that Clarence Conway has been her destroyer. Oh,
Clarence, Clarence! You, of whom I thought such pure
and noble thoughts;—you, who seemed to me so like a
man in excellence, as man was when he spoke unabashed
in the presence of the angels—how could you
stoop to this baseness, and riot on the poor victim,
abusing the fond attachment which proved her only
weakness, and which, in the eye of him she loved,
should have been her chief security and strength.”
Had Flora Middleton lived more in the world, and in
the great cities thereof—she might have been less severe
in examining the supposed conduct of her lover. Her
soliloquy might have been softened, as she reflected
upon the numbers among her sex, vicious and artful,
who save the betrayer some of his toils, and are
caught sometimes in their artifices; but of this class
of persons she had no knowledge, and did not even
conjecture their existence. She took it for granted that
Clarence Conway was the one who was wholly guilty
—his victim was only weak through the strength of her
attachment. The warmth of her own regards for her
lover enabled her to form a correct idea of that over-powering
measure which had been the poor girl's destruction;
and thinking thus, she had no indulgence for
him, whom she regarded as one recklessly, and without
qualification, wicked. But the truth is, even Edward
Morton, the real wrong-doer, had not, in this case, deserved
entirely this reproach. There was some truth
in the sarcasm which he uttered to Mary Clarkson,
when he told her that her own vanity had had considerable
part in her overthrow. She felt the partial
truth of the accusation, and her own reproaches followed
on her lips. It would be doing injustice to the
outlaw, were we to describe him as indifferent to her
situation. There was still something human in his nature,—some
portion of his heart not utterly ossified by
the long and earnest conversation which followed, between
him and his confidante in his chamber after the
exclusion of the surgeon, he had asked and received all
the information which could be given on the subject of
the events which had made her a victim to a like misfortune,
and in consequence of the same circumstances
as himself. He did not know the fact, nor could Watson
Gray inform him, that she received her hurts because
of the feeble attempt which she made to come to his
relief. But, all the circumstances led to this conviction,
and when the outlaw re-surveyed the ground over which
he had gone, and her unvarying devotedness through
the long and perilous period of strife, toil, and danger,
which had marked his footsteps!—when he remembered
how many had been her sacrifices, how firm had been
her faith,—the only one true, amid the many false, or
doubtful, and only secured by purchase;—when the
same train of thought reminded him, that, for all this
devotion, she had received few smiles, and no love,
from the very person for whom alone she smiled, and
who monopolized, without knowing how to value, all
the love of which she was capable;—it was then, possibly
for the first time in his life, that the cold and keen
reproaches of remorse touched his heart.
“I have done the poor creature wrong—I have not
valued her as she deserved!—See to her, Gray, for
God's sake, and let that fool of a surgeon, if he can do
any thing, not spare his efforts. If she survives I will
make amends to her. I will treat her more kindly;
for, never has poor creature been more faithful; and
I'm inclined to think that she must have been hurt in
some idle attempt to come to my succour. You say
you found her on the same spot?”
“Very nearly.”
“Surely, Clarence Conway could not have drawn
weapon upon her!”
“You forget. She was dressed in men's clothes,
and in the darkness of the evening.”
“Yes, yes,—but still a mere boy in appearance, and
have used deadly weapon upon one whose form was so
diminutive and evidently feeble. She was sick, too,—
she told me so,—but I had heard her complain so often,
that I gave her no credit for sincerity; and sent her
back to watch those d—d plotting scoundrels in the
swamp. Would the fiends had them!”
We need not pursue this dialogue further. The exhaustion
of the outlaw left him temporarily oblivious on
the subject of the girl; but, towards evening, starting
up from a brief, uneasy slumber, his first inquiry was
into her condition. When told that her skull was fractured,
that she was raging with fever and delirium, the
outlaw sank back, shut his eyes, and, though awake,
lay in a rigid silence, which showed the still active presence
of those better feelings of which it was his misfortune
to possess but few, and those too feeble for
efficient and beneficial service. How small was their
effect, may be judged from the success of the means
employed by Watson Gray to divert his mind from the
gloomy fit into which he seemed to have fallen. That
vicious adherent seized the moment to inform him of the
steps he had taken to lay the wrong done her innocence
at the door of Clarence Conway, and to convey this
impression to Flora Middleton. The exultation of a
selfish hope came in to silence remorse, and the outlaw
opened his eyes to eulogize the prompt villany of his
confederate.
“A good idea that, and it can do poor Mary no harm
now; and how looks Flora since she heard it? Have
you seen her since?”
“Yes: she looks twice as tall, and ten times as
haughty as before.”
“Flora Middleton to the life! The Semiramis or
Zenobia of the Congaree. As proud as either of those
dark, designing dames of antiquity. She fancied that
you were pitying her whenever your eyes turned upon
her face, and after that her only effort was to make
herself seem as insensible and indifferent as if she never
had a heart. Ah! Gray, my good fellow, only get me on
and if I do not carry the proud damsel off from all of
them, I deserve to lose all future stakes as well as all
the profits of the past. Keep that fool fellow of a surgeon
from probing me, simply that he may use his instrument
and fingers, and let him only do what you
think necessary or useful. I can't well believe that such
a civet-scented thing as that can possibly be of any use,
except to wind silk, or tend upon poodles; and would
sooner have your doctoring than that of the whole
tribe. Get me my limbs again, and the rest is easy.”
What was that rest? What were those hopes which
gave such a tone of exultation to the voice and language
of the wounded man? We need not anticipate.
The conjecture is only too easy. What should they be,
springing in such a rank soil, and born of such seed as
his criminal hands had planted? Dark, deep, and reckless,
was the determination of his soul; and wily, in the
highest degree, was the confederate to whose aid in
particular, its execution was to be entrusted. At this
moment it need only be said that, in the minds of the
conspirators, nothing appeared to baffle their desires
but the condition of their chief. All things seemed easy.
The fortune they implored, the fiend they served, the
appetitie which prompted, and the agents they employed,
all subservient, were all in waiting; and he who, of all,
was to be most gratified by their services,—he alone
was unable to make them available. Well might he
curse the folly which had brought him to his present
state, and denounce the feebleness which delayed the
last and crowning achievement on which his hopes and
desires were now set. His soul chafed with impatience.
He had no resources from thought and contemplation.
He could curse, but he could not pray; and curses, as
the Arabian proverb truly describes them, are like
chickens, that invariably come home to roost. They
brought neither peace nor profit to the sick bed of the
invalid, and they kept refreshing slumbers from his
pillow.
| CHAPTER VIII.
GUILT, AND ITS VICTIM. The kinsmen, or, The black riders of Congaree | |