University of Virginia Library

32. CHAPTER XXXII.

By the time that Kate and the negro had
laid the Colonel on a settee in the broad entry,
he was in a dead faint.

The girl, believing that life was extinct,
fell on her knees by his side, clasping one
of his drooping hands in both hers, and
staring at his ashy face with dilated eyes,
the whites showing clear around the iris.
Feeling, presently, a little flutter at his
wrist, she regained some hope, but only so
much hope, only such a terrible hope, as to
gasp, “He is dying.”

Just then the Beaumont men, getting
news in some way of the catastrophe, hurried
into the hall one after the other and
gathered around the senseless octogenarian.
Peyton was for a moment so overcome by
the calamity that he actually lost his head
and called like a frightened child, “Kershaw!
Kershaw!” then, catching sight of Vincent,
he turned sharply upon him and demanded,
“Why don't you see to him?”

“He is living,” replied the young man,
who, it will be remembered, had been bred
a physician. “Cato, bring some wine and
cold water. He has swooned away entirely.
He must have been hit early.”

“In my house!” groaned Peyton. “My
best friend shot in my own house!”

“Why did n't he call for help?” wondered
Tom. “An old gentleman like
that —”

“Ah, Tom, you don't know him,” muttered
the father. “He is n't the man to
call for help when his friends are under
fire.”

“Are none of you going to do anything?”
sobbed Kate, turning a piteous and reproachful
stare from face to face.

“My dear sister, he has simply fainted,”
replied Vincent. “The wound is in the
thigh, and probably a mere flesh wound.
Let go of him now, and let us get him to
bed.”

By this time the hall was crowded with
the house-servants, most of them uttering
suppressed whimpers of grief, for Kershaw
was worshipped by these poor people. Under
the direction of Vincent, four of the
strongest men took up the settee with its
heavy load and bore it to a bedroom,
followed by the trembling and crying
Kate.

“I say, Vincent,” whispered Tom.
“When you get through with him, take
a look at me. I want to know if any
bones are smashed.”

“You hit?” stared the elder brother.
He took hold of the wounded arm, moved it
up and down, and added, “It 's all right,
Tom. Nothing broken.”

Meantime Beaumont senior was glowering
about him and asking, “Where the
deuce is Nellie?”

“She 's jess done gone out to look after
Mars Ranny, what 's out thar in the ditch,”
explained Cato.

“Ah!” grunted Peyton; “that 's what I
wanted to tell her. Drunken beast! I
hope he 's dead.”

A little later his heart smote him for
thus leaving his eldest daughter to face her
perplexities and troubles alone. He sought
her out and found that she had already
caused her husband to be carried to her
room and laid on her bed.

“Nellie,” he whispered, just glancing
with aversion at the soiled, bloody, and still
insensible drunkard. “I don't want to be
hard. He can stay here till he is able to
go. But no longer, Nellie; at least I prefer
not. He is the cause of all this. But
for him there would have been no difficulty.
Besides, he has been such a brute to you, —
such a cruel, insulting brute! I don't feel
that I can have him here long.”

There were tears in Nellie's eyes. It is
not easy for a woman to look at blood and
suffering without pity. As she gazed at
Randolph's disfigured face and thought that
possibly he might be dying, she could not
help remembering that he had once been
Handsome Armitage, and that it was not
many years since it had been her greatest
joy to worship him. Much reason as she
had for despising and abhorring him, there
had come into her heart now some sympathy
and tenderness, and she had almost
thought that she might again endure, might
even again love him. Nevertheless, she
was rational; she admitted that her father
was right; the man must not stay long in
this house.

“I ask nothing more,” she said, shaking
her head hysterically. “Only that you will

please send for a physician. I don't want
him to die like a dog.”

“He shall not,” replied Beaumont, seizing
and pressing her arm. “Send yourself
for everything you want.”

Hurrying now to Kershaw's room, he
found that the old man had recovered his
consciousness, and was able to speak.

“Ah, my dear friend, you are quite yourself
again,” exclaimed Beaumont, his grim
face brightening with a joy which made it
beautiful.

“We will hope for the best,” murmured
Kershaw. In reality he had little confidence;
there were pains in his body which
led him to believe that the ball had glanced
upwards and made a mortal wound; but
Kate's eyes were fixed on him with a piteous
anxiety which would not allow him to
utter forebodings.

“O my dear!” she sighed, partly divining
the affectionate heroism of this sublime
utterance, and thanking him for it by pressing
his wrinkled hand against her wet face.

“Do not be troubled, my little girl,” he
continued, noticing her tears. “Even if the
worst comes, it is well. I have lived a long
while with you. I have seen you grow up.
It is a great deal. I was an old man when
you were born.”

“You were already wounded when you
told me to go in,” said Kate. “O, why
did n't I see it then?”

“It would have made little difference,”
he replied. “I could wait.”

It was evident that he spoke with difficulty,
and that his faintness was returning.

“Here, take this, Kershaw,” interposed
Beaumont, pouring out a glass of wine.
“My dear child, you must not make him
talk, and I think you had better go. She
can't help talking to you, Kershaw; she
never could.”

“O, don't take me away!” implored the
girl, rendered childish in mind and speech
by her grief. “I won't say a word.”

“She will do me no harm,” whispered
the invalid. “She helps me.”

Presently, recovering his strength a little,
he added in a clear voice, “Don't trouble
yourself, my dear Beaumont. You will
suffer with this standing. Sit down.”

Quite overcome by this thoughtfulness
for himself at such a moment, Peyton turned
away with the spasmodic grimace of a man
who struggles not to weep. When he had
somewhat regained his caimness, he dropped
wearily into an arm-chair, and gazed at Kershaw
with humid eyes.

The spectacle was worthy of his or of any
man's wonder and worship. In that dusky
face, seeming already stained with death,
— in that noble face, sublimely sweet with
native goodness and with the good thoughts
and deeds of a long life, — there was not a
look, not even a passing paroxysm of selfishness.
Neither pain, nor the loss of vital
power, nor the belief that he was drawing
near his end, could make Kershaw utter a
complaint or a claim for pity. If he had
words that were pathetic, it was because
they were touching with self-forgetfulness,
eloquent with sympathy for others.

After a while Dr. Mattieson, who had
been sent for in all haste, was shown in by
Vincent. Then Beaumont and Kate had
to leave the chamber in order to allow of a
thorough examination of the wound. “Will
they hurt him?” asked the daughter in the
crying tone of a grieving child; and then,
without waiting for an answer, she fled to
her room and locked the door. She felt
that her grief had reduced her to a state of
moral weakness which was infantile; and she
had resolved to seek strength at the foot
of that invisible throne which pierces the
heavens. Meantime the father walked softly
up and down the hall, expecting evil tidings,
but striving to hope. At last Vincent came
out with a grave face.

“What is it?” demanded Beaumont,
dragging the young man aside. “Not bad,
I hope.”

“Very bad,” said Vincent. “The ball
has glanced upward and probably penetrated
the abdomen. There is only too
much danger of peritonitis, and of course of
death.”

“Death!” whispered Beaumont, his
ruddy face turning to a brownish pallor.
“O my God, no, Vincent!” he absolutely
begged, smiting his nails into his palms.
“We can't have it so. Kershaw to die!
Kershaw murdered in my house! O no,
Vincent!”

His first thought was grief; his next was
vengeance. His eyes were reddened with
tears, but they were also bloodshot with
rage.

“O, what an account those brutes have
opened for themselves!” he went on hoarsely.
“They have murdered the noblest man I
ever knew. Murdered my best friend.
What an account — in the next world —
and in this! God will remember them.
But I can't leave it to him,” he burst out,
after a pause. “I and my boys must take
them in hand. Lest God should forget,”
he added, wiping away with his short, thick,
hairy hand the sweat of grief and wrath
which stood on his dark forehead.

Vincent made no demonstrations and
muttered few words. He was a calmer and
more taciturn man than his father, and valued
himself on doing more than he looked
or said. He scarcely scowled and his voice
was almost soft as he replied, “No one will
blame us, whatever happens.”

“You are right,” returned Beaumont.
“Public opinion will be with us. Hartland

can't support desperadoes who shoot such
men as Kershaw.”

Presently a new thought and a very painful
one startled him for a moment out of
these ideas of vengeance.

“Who will tell this to Kate?” he asked.
Almost immediately he added with vehemence,
“I can't.”

Vincent, though not a very sensitive or
affectionate being, was perplexed and made
no answer.

“She worships her grandfather,” groaned
Beaumont. “I can't tell her he is going to
die.”

Still Vincent offered no suggestion. “I
won't tell her,” decided the father. “Time
will let her know all.”

“It is the best way,” assented Vincent.
“Distribute a great emotion over as many
pulsations as possible. It is generally the
best way.”

During the afternoon Kershaw rallied a
little, and even the physicians began to have
faint hopes of him, impossible as it seemed
that so old a man could survive such a
wound. But early in the evening the horrible
agony of peritonitis, or inflammation of
the abdominal case, declared itself. Wonderful
as was the self-control of the invalid,
he could not help moaning and writhing
under his torture. No sleep; opiates could
not render nature insensible to that pain;
all night he was conscious and on the rack.

When in the morning Kate succeeded in
fighting her way with tears and pleadings
to his bedside, he was a pitiable spectacle.
His face had fallen; his forehead, nose, and
chin were prominent; his eyes were of a
leaden blue, and surrounded by dark circles;
his complexion, notwithstanding the fever,
was ashy and deathlike. His natural expression
of benignity had been so changed by
long straining against intolerable anguish,
that, had the girl seen him thus otherwhere,
she would not at once have recognized him.

Now and then there was a moan; it was
a feeble one, it is true, because he tried
still to hold himself under restraint; but,
breaking as it did through a life-long habit
of self-command, it was significant of immense
agony. It was like the last ripple,
the feeble remnant of a mighty wave, which
dies almost without noise among the reeds
of a sloping shore. Little in itself, it told
of a tempest.

“My dear,” he whispered to Kate as she
sat down paralyzed by his side. “I wish to
see our clergyman.”

“O, you are not going to die,” she burst
out wringing her hands.

“My dear, have they not told you?” he
answered. “Doubtless they meant it in
kindness. Neither did they tell me. But
it is so.”

Kate was crushed. She could neither
weep nor speak. She seemed to herself to
be of stone.

“Will you send for him?” he asked, after
waiting for some time in patient silence, striving
meanwhile to suppress all utterance of
pain.

Starting from her chair, Kate reeled out
of the room on her awful errand, moving by
jerks, as if she were a piece of imperfect
mechanism. During the half-hour which
elapsed before the arrival of the clergyman,
she walked the house without speaking,
except to whisper now and then, “It is n't
true, it is n't true.” Her reason, tried for
months past by trouble after trouble, nearly
sank under this new catastrophe. She
retained intelligence enough, however, to
know that her agitation would harm the
invalid if he should witness it, and to keep
away from the sick-room until she should
be able to re-enter it calmly. Her father
and sister, fearing for her sanity, sought to
condole with her, and to hold her quiet with
caressing arms.

“Let her walk,” whispered Vincent. “If
she could be got to gallop twenty miles, it
would be still better. I never saw such
infatuation,” he muttered to himself. “However,
he is like her, and we are not like her.
It is a case of natural sympathy, exaggerated
by circumstances.”

When Kate saw the minister arrive and
go in to Kershaw, she suddenly became
calm, and went to her own room, there, no
doubt, to pray for strength and resignation.

The Rev. Authur Gilyard was a man of
twenty-eight or thirty, tall and slender,
slightly bald, his skin fair and very pale,
with calm, serious blue eyes, and an expression
of natural firmness alternating with an
acquired gentleness. Firm as he was, however,
and disciplined as he had been by the
trials and duties of his profession, he faltered
when he saw the death-marked face
of his venerable parishioner, one of the
chief supporters of his little church, and his
own model of deportment and life.

“My dear friend and brother,” he began,
and stopped there, overcome by grief. His
next words were forced from him by deep
humility of soul, arising from a sense of his
own unworthiness to stand forward as a
preceptor to this elder disciple, this man to
whom from his childhood he had looked up
as his superior. “I have come to you,” he
said, “to learn how to die.”

“My dear pastor, I cannot teach you,”
sighed Kershaw. “Pray that we may both
be taught.”

But we will not ascend farther into the
solemnities of this more than earthly interview.

When it was over, the dying man sent
word to his son-in-law that he wished to see
him alone.

“Well, Kershaw, what can I do for you?”
asked Beaumont with assumed cheerfulness
as he seated himself by the bedside and took
the hand of his revered friend.

“Beaumont, you are a kind-hearted man,”
murmured the Colonel. “You have warm
and generous sympathies.”

“Ah, Kershaw, I am a poor, rough, old
fellow,” returned Peyton, shaking his head.

“Beaumont, you love your children,”
continued the invalid. “I wish you could
love your fellow-men as you do your children.”

“I do love some of them. I have loved
you, Kershaw —”

Here he stopped a moment, his hard face
twitching with emotion, and his grim eyes
filling with tears.

“If they were all like you, it would be
easy,” he went on. “But some of them are
such — such rascals! Those McAlisters,
for instance. How can a man love those
savages?”

“I was thinking of them,” resumed Kershaw.
“You know, Beaumont, that I have
wanted you all my life — my latter life, at
least — to be at peace with them. I want
it now.”

“But they have just shot you, Kershaw,”
blurted out Peyton. “I could have forgiven
them before. Now I can't.”

“I can,” said the dying man, fixing his
eyes solemnly on his friend.

Beaumont bowed his face under that
gaze.

“`Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,”'
continued Kershaw, his voice falling to a
whisper under a paroxysm of pain.

Beaumont shook his iron-gray head, as if
the text proffered aid to his vengeance, and
he could not accept it.

“It was a misunderstanding,” went on
Kershaw. “Those young men thought we
were attacking their brother.”

“But they knew you,” persisted Peyton.
“They knew that you never did harm to a
human being. Why should they fire so as to
hit you? The miserable, barbarous wretches!
Kershaw, I never can forgive them, never!”

After a short silence, during which he
wrestled with his agony, the old man said
deliberately, “We South-Carolinians are
not a law-abiding people.”

“Not a law-abiding people!” exclaimed
Peyton, in such surprise that he forgot
where he was and spoke quite loudly.

“No. We take punishment into our own
hands. We cannot wait for the law. We do
not trust the law. We make of ourselves
judge, jury, and executioner. The consequence
is that the State is full of homicide.
It is wrong, Beaumont. It is a violation of
the faith of man in man. It strikes at the
base of society. It tends to barbarism.”

“Kershaw, you astonish me,” said Pey
ton, who thought his friend's reason was
beginning to fail. “But are you not tiring
yourself? Had n't you better rest a
little?”

“I cannot rest, Beaumont. I must not
rest until I have an answer from you. I
ask you not to avenge me upon the McAlisters.
Can't you promise it to me? Beaumont,
can't you?”

“Ah, Kershaw, you drive me to the
wall,” groaned Peyton. “Well — yes, I
must promise. I do.”

“And will you beg of your sons not to
avenge me?”

“Yes, I will do even that,” assented Peyton.
He did not want to agree to so much,
but he was fairly driven to it by a sudden
spasm in Kershaw's face, which he thought
was the invasion of death.

A glass of wine partially restored the
invalid, and he continued his plea for humanity.

“I know that I can trust you,” he whispered.
“You always keep your word.
And now, if I could obtain one other promise
from you, I should die contented. Can
you not forgive these men altogether, Beaumont?
Can you not make peace with
them? Has not this feud shed blood
enough? Remember that I am one of its
victims. I have a right to bear witness
against it. Can you not, for my sake as
well as for the sake of humanity, for the
sake of those whom it still threatens, and
for the sake of their Creator and yours,
can you not promise to do your utmost to
end it?”

It may seem strange that Peyton Beaumont
should not have told some gentle
falsehood with regard to making peace, for
the purpose of soothing his dying friend.
But this rough man was profoundly honest;
he would not have uttered a white lie, if he
had thought of it; and he did not even
think of it. No, it was not in his nature to
promise to end the feud, unless he meant to
end it. So, with Kershaw looking at him,
as it were, from the other side of the grave,
he remained silent until he could come to a
decision. When it was reached, such as it
was, he uttered it.

“Yes, Kershaw,” he said. “I will — yes,
I will do — the best I can. You know how
old this thing is. You know how it is tangled
up with our lives and our very natures.
Don't make me promise more than I can
perform. But I will remember what you
ask, Kershaw. I will do what I can.”

“It is enough,” said the invalid. “I trust
you and thank you.”

Here he fainted quite away and was
thought for a time to be dead; but the
charge of vitality was not yet exhausted,
and he came back to consciousness. It was
during this insensibility that Lawson arrived

and was shown into the room. The dying
man received him with a smile which triumphed
over a spasm of agony.

“Lawson, I am glad to see you,” he said.
“I bear this the better for seeing you once
more. But I can only say a few words. I
must bid you good by quickly. You are a
good man, Lawson; you have a gentle, loving
heart. I think you never wished a
human being harm. I have seen the sweetness
of your soul and loved you for it. You
are one of the children of peace. God reward
you, Lawson. God bless you.”

It was visible at this moment that the
Major was not that shallow and merely
babbling being which many people judged
him to be. Completely overwhelmed by
this parting from the man whom he loved
and reverenced above all other men, he
could not utter a word beyond a convulsive,
“Kershaw!” Then he knelt down suddenly,
hid his face in the bedclothes, and
sobbed audibly.

The invalid next bade a calm farewell to
Nellie Armitage, to her three brothers, and
to Mrs. Chester.

“My dear young friends, I have left
something for each of you,” was one thing
which he said to them. “And in my will I
have ventured to beg that you — you young
men, I mean — will strive to be at peace
with your fellow-men. I trust that you will
not be vexed with me for that exhortation,
and that you will bear it in mind. God
guide and bless you all, my dear friends.”

After this he was left alone, at his own
gently hinted request, with Peyton Beaumont
and Kate.

“Hold fast to my hand,” he whispered
to the girl. “I go straight from you to
your mother.”

At these words the tears burst loose from
Beaumont's eyelids, and rolled down his
grim, unshaven face.

“Kershaw, give her my love,” he said
with impulsive faith, alluding to his dead
wife. “But I never was worthy of her.
God forgive me.”

Kate, with the hand that was free, reached
out and took her father's hand. She was
not crying; her grief was too hard to give
forth tears; but with all her suffering, she
could pity.

“I will be good to her child, — to my
child,” added Beaumont, with a sob.

“God help you so,” replied Kershaw in a
voice so solemn that it seemed to come
from the other world. “God be with you
both.”

These were the last rational words that
he spoke. For some time, unobservedly to
those about him and unconsciously to himself,
he had been struggling, not only with
weakness and anguish, but also with the
commencement of that delirium which inva
riably results from the intense inflammation
of peritonitis. He had, as it were, fought
with devils for his reason in order that he
might bid farewell to those whom he loved,
and exhort them to a better life. This duty
accomplished, he fell on his field of victory.
Incoherence came upon him, like reeling
upon a wounded hero; and then followed
hours on hours of wandering, without one
gleam of sanity. The final stage was come;
there were hours more of sleep, or rather of
stupor; he saw nothing, heard nothing, and,
happy at least in this, felt nothing. Then,
before any one perceived it, he was dead.

“He is gone,” said Beaumont, taking one
of his daughter's hands, and passing an arm
around her waist, as if he would prevent her
from flying also to the other world.

For a minute she made no reply, her
whole soul being absorbed in gazing into the
face of the dead and searching there for some
signs of life. At last she said with strange
deliberation, “All the confidence and sympathy
that it has taken all my life to create
are gone in one moment.”

Having thus summed up the catastrophe
that had overtaken her, she fell back on her
father's shoulder, pallid and apparently
senseless.