University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.

Leaving the persevering Squire, still undiscouraged by his
repeated defeats, to devise, by the expected disclosures and assistance
of his freshly discovered ally, new schemes on the ruins
of the old, for the accomplishment of his object, which however
hopeless the case might seem to one less fertile in expedients, he
had no notion of yet relinquishing, we will now return to the
abode of his opponent, through whom most of the remainder of
our story will be, perhaps, the best developed.

After Old Jude had succeeded in consummating his baseness
towards his niece, in the settlement we have described, and sent
off Shack to carry the evidence of his iniquitous triumph to Stacy,
he, being then left alone in his room, sat some minutes immersed
in deep thought; when arousing himself, with the air of one
who has run through some calculation and found every thing
satisfactory, he began to soliloquize:—

“Yes, as far as I can see, every bar is now put up, and all is
safe, at last, which makes my property as good as in my best
days,—perhaps a little better. Well, I would'nt have been so
frightened for any small sum! But I have headed the meddling
rascal cleverly, blast him! and I want he should know it, which
will be both a caution and a punishment to him, till I can safely
punish him more effectually. I wonder what he will say, when
he reads the paper—I should like just to get a peep at his face,
at the time, to see him wince under the bitter pill?” And the
old man chuckled aloud with inward exultation at the thought
of having outdone one of the shrewdest lawyers in the country,
and thus secured to himself a fortune. “Well, he and his young
prig of a lawyer, won't be quite so fierce to get the girl now, I
guess, seeing they can't get the property, in which they were to
go snucks, I suppose. But if the hateful young dog should persevere,

he must be stopped—'twont do to let him marry her—he
may be digging up something. No, Lucy must be cured, but in
some different way from the one I tried—though if I could have
provoked him to strike me. But stay, I forgot to watch Shack!
—no knowing who can be tampered with—perhaps it ain't too
late to see to it now,” he added jumping up and passing out at a
back door to the top of a sharp little hill near the house embowered
with fruit trees, where, unseen himself, he could obtain a
view of the road even to Stacy's office door—being the post of
observation which he had used a fortnight before in dogging Lot
and Stacy to the office, when, in his jealousy and meanness, he
stole round to the rear of the building and played the eavesdropper
as already intimated.

“Ah! there, Shack is just entering the office,” he resumed,
peering through the shrubbery—“I will allow him five minutes
to do the business in and be out.”

So saying the suspicious old man took out his watch and noted
the minute hand till the allotted time had expired; when,
looking up and seeing nothing of Shack, he became uneasy, and
his cold, grey eye began to gleam with distrustful glances. In
less than another moment, however, the servant emerged from
the office door and struck out directly for home.

“All right—even if he had tried to tamper, he couldn't have
made the stupid booby understand anything, in so short a time,”
said Old Jude, with relaxing countenance, as he put up his
watch, and retraced his steps back to his room, where Shack, in
a short time made his appearance, and, with his usual air of
careless indifference, delivered the paper, with which he had
been despatched, to its owner.

“What did he say, Shack,” eagerly asked the latter.

“Um?—what?”

“What did he say, I ask you, when he read the paper?”

“Um?—O, not much, but what was in it, that made him look
so queerish about it?”

“No matter—what did he say and do?”

“Um?—what?—O, he said 'twas good enough in law, he
s'posed, then had something over to himself and acted kinder
maddish.”

“Then it made him mad, did it, Shack?”

“Um?—what?—O, yes,—grumbled, and made faces, like.”

“Ha! ha! ha! he! he! he! Good!” again chuckled the
old man in his dry, hyena-like laughter—“There, Shack, you
may go back now, to your hoeing in the meadow.”

For the remainder of the day Old Jude gave himself almost
wholly up to the enjoyment of his fancied triumph. The scheme
had employed all his powers of cunning and contrivance for
years; and he now, for a while, felt a pleasure and exultation,
not only in proportion to the magnitude of the object, but to the
anxious study, the constant fears, and especially the recent
alarms, he had experienced, in accomplishing it. But the human
mind has been so constituted by a just and wise Providence
that it can never long receive happiness from the success, or from
any of the fruits of fraud and injustice. The excitement of the
chase, the employment of the faculties in devising, and the energies
in executing a scheme of iniquity, may, indeed, for the
time, stifle the voice of conscience; and the final achievement
of the object may, at first, bring a sort of savage pleasure to the
bosom. But when those faculties and energies cease their exertion,
when the attendant excitement dies, and the short-lived
pleasure of the triumph passes away, the mind reacts, the conservative
principle we have named begins its office, and soon
brings the heart to long and painful repentance or plants within
its core the thorn of enduring remorse.

And so it was with this execrable wretch, in the execution of
his flagitious plot for robbing his orphan niece of her inheritance.
As the excited feeling attendant on the pursuit of his
object, and the almost fiendish glee he had felt in its accomplishment,
subsided, other and unwelcome thoughts began to obtrude
themselves on his mind. He could not, with all the sophistry,
with which, villain-like, he essayed to appease the annoying
suggestions of awakening conscience,—he could not help seeing
that his was not, in fact, a triumph over a hated opponent, but
over an innocent, defenceless girl. He could not prevent the
promise he made to his dying brother, to be just to the fatherless,
from recurring again and again to his remembrance, which
seemed strangely to grow more vivid in this particular, the
more he attempted to deaden it. And he went to his lone bed
that night with thoughts and feelings which he tried in vain,
and which he cursed himself for not having the power to banish,

from his disturbed mind with thoughts and feelings, in short,
which none but the guilty can know.

Sometime in the night, he was suddenly awakened by a
strange noise,—he could hardly tell what, though it seemed to
him like a human groan, coming from beneath, or some place
not greatly distant, as far as he could attach any definite idea to
it, in his confusion. But it chimed in so well with a troublous
dream, which he now recalled as having just disturbed him, that
he soon concluded the supposed noise must have been part of it;
and, uttering a peevish psha! he tried to compose himself again
to sleep. And in this he had nearly succeeded, when the same
hollow groan, issuing from below, and seemingly struggling upward,
as if though the opening of a rending tomb, rose distinctly
on his startled ears, and died away, moaningly uttering, as he
thought, “My brother, Oh, my brother why hast thou disturbed
me?”

The confused and frightened old man sprang bolt upright in
his bed, and, with glaring eyes, peered over on to the floor, and
round the dimly seen corners of his room; but he could discover
nothing. He then, with palpitations so wild and audible as almost
to disturb his own hearing, sat some moments listening intently
for a repetition of the dreaded but expected sound. He
was unable, however, to distinguish even the slightest noise.
All within and around was as silent as the grave. Still not satisfied
to let the mystery rest here, he arose and groped his way
out of his room and round into that of his servant, who slept in
the next adjoining apartment. But Shack was snoring loudly
and evidently had not been disturbed. The old man then came
out into the long hall, that ran by their rooms, and again listened
for some movement in other parts of the house. He would
have felt almost thankful to have heard the stealthy steps of
thieves, of whom he usually stood in much fear; for it would
have relieved him of an awe and dread far more terrible. But
he could not hear any thing; and he soon returned to his bed,
and, after an hour's turning and tumbling, varied only by fitful
starts and turns of intense listening, was lucky enough to fall
asleep.

The next morning Old Jude arose with a perplexed and
troubled brow, and made anxious enquiries of all the members of
the family, whether they had heard any unusual noises during

the night. Uniformly answering him in the negative, they, in
their turn, became curious to know why he had made such enquiries;
and, it was easy to see, that although he evaded their
questions, or turned them off with some false account, his conduct
and appearance had not a little excited and disturbed them.
But they were left to indulge in such conjectures as they chose
to make, for he studiously avoided any further conversation on
the subject.

“It could'nt have been any thing but a dream, after all—Psha!
what a fool to be so disturbed!” muttered the old man to himself
with an effort to shake off the impression, as he seated himself
at his writing desk and began the business he had allotted for
the day.

But notwithstanding these efforts to deceive himself and quiet
his disturbed feelings, he was far from being at ease through the
day; and, at night, as the family retired, he was observed to go
round and carefully lock, or bar up inside, the doors, and all
possible avenues of ingress to the house. For the three succeeding
nights, the old man neither heard nor saw any thing to disturb
him. By this time he had so far succeeded in making himself
believe, that he had been the dupe of his imagination, sleeping
or waking, as to enable him to divest himself mostly of his
fears of a repetition of the strange occurrence. And, as he rose
on the fourth morning following the mysterious event, after hooting
at himself awhile for his folly in ever having bestowed a
serious thought on the subject, he resolved to go on, as if nothing
had happened, with that part of his grand scheme, which,
now that the property was secured against any ordinary event,
only remained to be completed, that of causing his niece to discard
the young lawyer, for whom, he doubted not, she still
cherished an affection, that, if not destroyed, would result in
their union. Having previously meditated attempting secretly
to undermine Lot's character, as a method of accomplishing this
object, he went out, after breakfast, for a walk to some of the
public resorts of the place, where he might meet with some of
that despicable class, who are the curse of country villages—the
retailers of slander, into whose ears he could whisper his insinuations
with a certain prospect, that they would soon grow into
stories sufficiently damning to subserve his purposes, or where,
perhaps, he would meet with opportunities of effecting his purpose

by other and more direct means. And he had been out
but a short time, before he unexpectedly met with an occurrence,
out of which, with his usual cunning, he soon contrived a plot
that was singularly well calculated to favor, if not wholly effect
the general object he had in view. He encountered in the road,
a poorly clad, vagrant young woman, who asked his charity to
buy food and clothing for herself and the small child she carried
in her arms. At first the old man turned away with his habitual
snuff of contempt at such objects; but musing a moment, he
turned round and asked her a few rapid questions, by which he
gathered, that she was from an adjoining town—had been deserted
by a suitor on the eve of a promised marriage, and was
now an outcast, with the fruits of her imprudence on her hands,
a male child, now nearly a year old.

“Well, woman,” said Old Jude, after listening attentively to
her various replies, “if you will let me name your boy, and then
do as I say, I will give you something.”

“My child has already been named,” replied the woman.

“Ah? well, you may call him by it after you leave this place;
but while you are here, if you will call him Lot Fisher in the
hearing of all you speak with, and give no explanations, I will
give you a dollar.”

“I don't see what good that can do you, Sir; but as it won't
hurt the child”—

“No—not in the least; so here is your dollar. But don't forget
the name, Lot Fisher, nor the condition—there, you may go
now—stay, do you see that house yonder,” added the speaker
pointing to his own house,—“well, call there, and you will find
a young lady, who is partial to that name, they say, and she will
give you something, I presume.”

The woman, after balancing the coin in her hand a moment,
in evident hesitation, finally put it up and moved on in the direction
indicated by Old Jude, who kept his eye on her, and soon
had the satisfaction of seeing her enter his house.