University of Virginia Library

19. CHAPTER XIX.
MR. KILGORE RECOVERS HIS HEALTH, AND HIS DAUGHTER
RECOVERS SOMETHING BETTER.

When Fanny returned, full of anxiety and curiosity,
from her school at noon, she found the family with disturbed
and solemn faces, actively engaged in ministering
to their unexpected patient. Mary, intensely excited,
was busy with such offices for her father as she
could perform without entering his presence, though her
caution was unnecessary, for he was unconscious. Dr.
Gilbert had bled him after his removal to a bed. This
had relieved his more urgent symptoms; but there followed
long fits of fainting, and these, in turn, had been
succeeded by a violent reaction, accompanied by a hot
delirium. He raved about his daughter, alternately
cursing her for her disobedience, and piteously pleading
with her to return to her home. Much of this incoherent
language Mary overheard; and it was the cause
of a profound revulsion in her feelings. It called back
the old love which she once had cherished for her father,
and in her sensitive spirit awakened questions as to the
propriety of what she had done. How far was she

guiltily responsible for this catastrophe? Had she not
been selfish? Had she not been hasty? If her father
should die, would not the blame of his death be at her
charge?

Her father had seemed to her like an iron man—a
man without a heart. She had never dreamed that any
event could throw him from his balance—that any excitement
that he might feel on her account could proceed
to such a crisis as that which had prostrated him.
As he lay, helpless and moaning, away from home and
friends, a fountain of long frozen and pent-up tenderness
in her heart gushed forth. The hard, imperious, defiant
father had repulsed not only herself, but her sympathy
and affection; the helpless and friendless father melted
her.

It was natural, of course, that, in this hour of her
darkness and trial, she should call upon Arthur Blague
for assistance. Accordingly, all the time he could spare
from his business, he spent at the bedside of the patient,
ministering to his wants, and controlling him in the
more violent demonstrations of his disease.

Days came and went, Fanny still attending to the duties
of the schoolmistress, and the latter doing every thing
which she could do for her father. The fever and the
delirium passed away at last, and they threatened to
leave him in the arms of death. Through all these
weary days and nights, Mary had wept and prayed—
wept for the pain she had caused, and prayed for the
forgiveness of all that God had seen of wrong in her
treatment of her father—prayed that he might recover,
and that then, while his hands were weak, and the eye
of the world, which he so much regarded, was removed

from him, the great Spirit which moulds and moves the
hearts of men, would turn his heart toward her and the
man whom her love had made sacred to her.

On the evening when the fever reached its crisis,
Dr. Gilbert came down stairs, and taking his seat in the
parlor by Mary, told her that the night would probably
decide her father's fate. She gathered from the expression
of his face and the tone of his voice, that, in his
judgment, the event was problematical. Up to this time
she had not consented that his New York friends should
be made aware of his illness, and she felt that there was
another terrible responsibility upon her. She learned
that he was lying in entire unconsciousness, his excitement
all gone, and his pulse but feebly fluttering with
life. Her reserve was laid aside in a moment. She
rose to her feet, struggling to control the convulsions of
her grief, ascended the stairs, and, for the first time, entered
the chamber where her father lay. Arthur was
there, endeavoring to compel the patient to swallow a
stimulating draught. She quietly took the cup from his
hand, and indicated her wish that he should retire. The
moment the door was closed, she sank upon her knees,
and, pressing her lips to her father's cold and clammy
hand, burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping.

As the first gust of her sorrow subsided, she began
to pray. At the beginning, her words were earnest and
importunate whispers; but soon her voice, in the stress
of her passion, joined in the utterance, and the very
walls of the room seemed to listen to, and drink in, the
language of her plaint and her petition. She prayed
that God, the All-Loving, the All-Merciful, the All-Powerful,
would restore her father to health—that then and

there He would reveal Himself to succor and to save.
She prayed for her own pardon, and for grace to bear
the blow, if her father should be taken from her. She
prayed that, if the life which was become so precious to
her should be spared, out of this great trial and great
danger might spring precious fruits of good to her and
all who were dear to her. Often pausing, she kissed the
hand she held, and exclaimed: “Alas! that I should be
the cause of this!”

At length she rose, and placed her hand upon her
father's damp brow, and smoothed back the thin, white
hair upon his temples, and listened to his breathing.
Then she sank upon her knees again, and bathed his
hand with tears.

Precious ministry of filial love! — bruised and
trodden under feet for many long and cruel months, yet
still vigorous at the root, and full of perfume in its
broken branches! She felt the feeble pulse, and
there was a new thrill in it. She looked upon the impassive
face, and the pinched, deathly look had passed
away. As she gazed, trembling with excitement and
hope, it seemed, to her sharpened apprehensions, as if a
voice had whispered to her soul: “Your prayer is answered.”
So real was the assurance, that she exclaimed:
“My Heavenly Father, I thank thee!”

As she watched and wept, and kissed the hand which
she still held, and gazed in her father's face, she saw
tears form beneath the closed lids, and creep down the
pale cheeks, and leave their track of healing where she
had not seen tears before for many years. She grasped
the hand she held with the fervor of her joy, and with
such emphasis that it seemed as if an electric thrill had

been shot through the sick man's frame. “Do you
know me?” she exclaimed. “Do you know your
Mary?”

The feeble lips tried to utter a reply, but the tide of
life had not yet risen to them. A gentle return of the
pressure which she had maintained upon his hand was
his response.

“And do you—can you—forgive me? Tell me
so;” and the hand, as it responded, was covered with
kisses.

Then came to the excited and grateful daughter another
gush of tears. Why does she weep now? Ah!
there is another question which she longs to ask! She
hesitates. On that question hang the equivalents of life
and death to her. She had become aware that behind
the veil of weak and powerless flesh before her, there
was a spirit whose eyes and ears had been open during
all her presence in the chamber. She knew, when those
tears slid out upon her father's cheek, from eyes that
seemed asleep, that there was a wakeful soul behind
them, in calm consciousness all the while. She knew that
he had been touched by her presence and her prayers.
She felt that somehow God had made her a minister of
life to him. She shaped her question. It was brief,
and as she breathed it to her earthly father, her thoughts
went upward, far above that powerless form, to Him
who was feeding the springs of its returning life, with
the prayer for favor.

“And him?”

A shadow of pain gathered upon those pale features
—a spasm of distress—indicative of the struggle which
that little question caused in his feeble mind. Mary

watched him with trembling anxiety, condemning herself
for her haste in putting him to such a trial in such
a condition. A tremor passed over his frame, as if he
had summoned himself to a great decision. Mary rose
suddenly to her feet in alarm, and bent her face close to
his. Slowly the long-sealed eyelids opened, and father
and daughter gazed into each other's eyes. The struggle
was over, and a feeble smile, full of kindness, lighted for
a moment the old man's face, and then the eyes closed
again.

To this moment of perfect reconciliation with her
father, Mary in after years looked back as the happiest
of her life. It translated her at once from the realm of
doubts and darkness in which she had walked since she
left her home, into the realm of her fondest dreams—
from realities of the sternest mould, into probabilities
of life that seemed impossible of realization from the
supernal charm with which her loving imagination had
invested them. Broad and bright before her opened
the pathway of the future. In a moment, her heart had
travelled over the distance that interposed between her
and him to whom for many weary months she had been
lost, in anticipation of the meeting which should repay
for all anxiety and all suffering. During the rapid passage
of thoughts that crowded through her mind, her
thanks went upward all the time to Him to whose overruling
providence she traced all the blessedness of the
moment, as incense rises heavenward from censers
swung by unregarding children.

As the smile faded from her father's lips, she stooped
and imprinted a kiss upon them, full of tenderness and
gratitude, saying: “Father, you will get well, and we

shall be very, very happy again. Now I must write
some letters, and you must sleep. I shall sit with you
to-night, and no hand but mine shall nurse you hereafter.”
She then administered the cordial that Arthur
had left, and retired from the room.

As she came again into the presence of the family,
her countenance beamed as if she had stood upon the
Mount of Transfiguration. She shook the doctor's hand
in her joy, and kissed Aunt Catharine and Fanny. “O
my friends! I am happier than I can tell you,” she said.
“My father's crisis is past—he will get well—and we
are friends.” All were glad in her happiness, but their
sympathy was accompanied by a pang which all experienced
alike. That which brought joy to her, separated
her from them.

Leaving her to write her letters to her New York
friends, informing them of the illness of her father and
his apparent amendment, we will pass over two or three
days, and look in upon one of these friends.

The hours of business were over in Mr. Frank Sargent's
modest establishment, and its enterprising proprietor
had withdrawn into his little counting-room, and
shut to the door. For a while, he thought of his business;
and there came to him, strangely, thoughts about
Miss Fanny Gilbert's novel. It had not succeeded—
would not sell. He must write to the doctor, and
claim the fulfilment of that gentleman's pledge to share
the loss which the publication of the book had occasioned.
He thought of the doctor, and tried to imagine
the features of his daughter. He could not get them
out of his mind. They and the book haunted him. If

his thoughts strayed away, or were forced away into
other matters, they came back immediately to them.

He tired of this at last, and, unlocking a little
drawer at his side, he drew forth a letter that he had
read a thousand times before, but one which always
gave him an impetus into reveries that drove business
out of his mind. He opened and read:

The closing words of this letter he read, and read
again. The abrupt sentences and the marks of tears,
not yet obliterated, showed in what a passion of tenderness
they were written. Nearly three years had passed
away since that letter was received, and its words were
the last he had seen from her hand. Where on the
earth's face she wandered or sojourned, he knew not.
Whether she were still in the land of the living, he knew
not. It had cost him the daily exercise of all his faith
in her and in God to maintain his courage and equanimity.
Her father had visited him in anger, demanding
the hiding-place of his daughter; and when he had
stated the substance of this letter, and the fact that he
absolutely knew nothing of her, he was told that he lied.

The letter lingered in his hands. It was indued with
a new charm. There was a strange vitality in its utterances
that took hold of his heart with a fresh power.

As he sat regarding it, it seemed as if the spirit of Mary
was at his side, looking over his shoulder. In the twilight,
he hardly dared to stir; and a superstitious fear
crept over him—a fear that his Mary was indeed dead,
and was present with him in a form which he could
not see.

He was startled from these imaginations at last, by
the entrance of his errand-boy, with a package of letters
from the post-office. The first upon which he laid his
hand had upon it the post-mark, “Crampton, N. H.”
The hand was the same that he had been perusing. He
opened it and read:

He sprang to his feet transformed. The listlessness
was gone, and every nerve in his frame thrilled with
excitement. The night-boat had left, and, though impatient
beyond expression, he was obliged to wait until
morning before setting out. In the mean time, he had
a world of business to attend to. He sent for his principal
clerk, told him that he should be absent for several
days—how long he could not tell—and gave him all the
necessary directions for carrying on the business. He
replied to his letters, laid out work for his clerks, and in
three hours had transacted more business than an ordinary
man would have done in as many days. He
looked forward and provided for the payment of his
notes; and, arranging for a daily interchange of letters
between himself and his establishment, retired to his
boarding-house to prepare for his journey.

Now that we are to see more of Mr. Frank Sargent,
we should know more about him. It will be seen readily
enough that he was not a great man. Why did so good
and so noble a woman love him? Simply because he
was true, and had life in him. Wherever he went, there
went gladness and vivacity. Frank Sargent was always
wide awake. He only needed the presence of half a
dozen people to stimulate him into the most delightful
drolleries. People loved to hear him talk, whether he
uttered sense or nonsense. He could sit down by the
side of an old woman and charm her by his tide of small
talk, or frolic with a band of merry children, until his
coat-tails were in danger. He was a great man in small
parties, an indispensable man at picnics, the superintendent
of a Sabbath-school, a “bloody Whig” in politics,
as he delighted to call himself, and the most zealous and
earnest of his circle in a revival of religion. He was a
man who stirred up every circle he entered, and was
welcome everywhere except at the house of the elder
Kilgore.

The reader has already learned incidentally, that he
had been a clerk in the house of the Kilgore Brothers.
In this house, he had made himself very popular, both
at home and away, for he had travelled for the house
quite extensively. The old man had once greatly delighted
in Frank Sargent. When he came back from
his long trips, it was the highest entertainment the elder
Kilgore had at his command, to invite Frank home to
dine with him, and hear him relate his adventures by the
way, and tell of his ingenious methods for entrapping
“lame ducks,” a kind of game which the house, in its
large and widely extended operations, had a good deal

to do with. Many were the hours which the vivacious
traveller helped Mr. Kilgore to pass pleasantly away,
and great was Mr. Kilgore's admiration of, and confidence
in him. Fertile, volatile, voluble, with a great
capacity for business, a thorough devotion to the interests
of his employer, and a sense of Christian honor
which always manifested itself as the basis of his character,
he was, indeed, no mean companion for an old
man like Mr. Kilgore.

Still, Mr. Kilgore always regarded him as an inferior—a
man to be patronized and encouraged, particularly
so long as he was an efficient minister to the prosperity
of the house, and aided in the digestion of a good
dinner. Frank Sargent knew the old man, and humored
him by always “keeping his place”—going no further
than he was led. This, Mr. Kilgore appreciated; and
he regarded the young man with great complacency.
Of course, when the clerk visited Mr. Kilgore's house,
he met Mr. Kilgore's daughter; but Mr. Kilgore's estimate
of his own position and that of his family, and his
confidence in Frank Sargent as a young man who knew
his place, forbade the suspicion that between the young
people there could be more than the common interchanges
of politeness. In fact, he had, on more than
one occasion, apologized to his daughter for bringing
Mr. Frank Sargent home with him.

After Mr. Kilgore had finished his heavy dinner, and
had become too dull to listen to the conversation of his
talkative clerk, the young man felt at liberty to devote
himself to the daughter, and she, in turn, felt bound to
entertain him. We are not aware that there is any
philosophy that will satisfactorily account for two

people, totally unlike, falling in love with each other.
It is a matter of every-day occurrence, as all know. At
any rate, Frank Sargent and Mary Kilgore met but a
few times in friendly intercourse, before, by steps which
they did not mark in the passage, they became lovers.
Thus the matter went on for weeks and months, the old
man, in his purse-proud blindness, seeing nothing of the
state of affairs. Mary occasionally dropped in at the
store, and it was there, in her conversations with the
young man, that the jealousy of the other clerks was
aroused, Mr. Dan Buck's among the rest.

At last, Frank Sargent began to think that if he was
to become the husband of Mary Kilgore, he must be
something more than a clerk, and have more than a
clerk's income. Both he and Mary supposed that the
old man knew, or suspected, their attachment for each
other; and furthermore believed, from his cordiality to
the young man, that he looked upon the matter with
favor. So Frank Sargent, on one occasion, proposed to
Mr. Kilgore the subject of going into business on his
own account. The old gentleman expressed surprise
and regret, but would not interfere. He knew that the
young man's personal popularity would take custom
from his own house, but he was too proud to admit, for
an instant, that anybody was essential to the house of
the Kilgore Brothers but himself.

Frank Sargent then set up for himself, and made
a good beginning. Mr. Kilgore's old customers, many
of them, came to him, and he had the good-will of all
his associates. But his love matters would have to
come to a crisis sooner or later, and so it was agreed
between the lovers that he should make to the father of

the young woman a formal proposition for her hand.
Great was the surprise, and greater the wrath, of the
great Kilgore, when the audacious young bookseller submitted
his confession of love, and his request for the
bestowal of its object upon him by its nominal owner.
The old man was at first thunder-struck, then indigant,
then angry. He drove him out of his counting-room,
forbade him his house, and, from that moment, was his
enemy; losing no opportunity to injure him in his business,
and striving by all allowable means to crush him.

The rest of this long story is sufficiently in the
reader's possession. Mutual friends contrived meetings
for the lovers, and at last, after a painful scene between
father and daughter, the latter fled, leaving only the letter
which Frank Sargent had perused every day for three
years before he received another from the same hand.

Bright and early on the morning succeeding the
events in the young publisher's counting-room, that gentleman,
having passed a sleepless night, stepped on
board the good steamer Bunker Hill, and set out on his
journey to Crampton.

Alas! for the impatient feet that trod the deck of the
industriously toiling steamer! If Frank Sargent could
have increased her speed by the application of that fraction
of a one-horse power that was in him, he would
contentedly have labored at the crank all the way.
When, at last, he landed, and commenced the passage
up the valley as “a deck passenger” of the slow coach
—for he always rode where he could see the horses, and
talk with the driver—it seemed as if the long miles had
surpassed the statute to a criminal degree. But all
journeys have an end, and, still sleepless, he found himself

at length seated with Cheek upon the box of the
little Crampton coach.

Frank Sargent could not have fallen in with any one
better informed than Cheek, of the points upon which
he needed light. So, by a process which a thoroughbred
New Yorker understands in an eminent degree, he
“pumped” him all the way; praised his horses, and
managed to get out of him Mary's history since he had
known her. He learned also of the presence of Mr.
Kilgore in Crampton, of the dangerous sickness he had
survived at the house of Dr. Gilbert, and of the rumor,
current in the village, that father and daughter had
“made up,” and that “the whole thing had been
straightened.”

“I tell you,” said Cheek with emphasis, as a general
summing up of his revelations, “that any man who
takes Mary Kilgore out of Crampton against her will,
will kick up the greatest row that ever was started in
this place.”

Now it did not occur to Cheek at all, that the lively
gentleman who sat upon the box with him, and begged
the privilege of driving his horses, was Mary's lover;
so, after Frank Sargent had succeeded in getting all the
information he wanted from the driver, the latter undertook
to obtain fitting repayment. “I reckon, perhaps,
you know Mary Hammett, as we used to call her,
pretty well, don't you?” said Cheek.

“Know her? I think I do,” responded his passenger.

“Brother, perhaps?”

“No.”

“Cousin, may be?”

“Not a bit of it.”

“Some sort of relation, I s'pose?”

“Well, no—not exactly.”

“Neighbor?”

“Yes, neighbor—old neighbor—old friend—knew
her years ago—known her ever so long.”

“Well, I guess she'll be glad to see you, now. You
don't know the feller she's engaged to, do you?”

“Oh! yes; I know him very well; he's a particular
friend of mine.”

“I vow! I should like to see him,” said Cheek; “he's
punkins, ain't he?”

“Some,” replied Frank Sargent, with a laugh he
could not repress. Then he added: “What kind of a man
do you suppose he is? How do you think he looks?”

“Well, I don't know,” replied the driver. “My
mind's always running on one thing and another when
I'm driving along, and I've thought him up a good many
times. I reckon I should know him if I should see
him.”

“Just describe him, then. I can tell you whether
you are right or not.”

“Well, I reckon,” said Cheek, squinting across the
top of a tall pine-tree they were passing, “that he's a
tall feller, with black whiskers and black clothes, and an
eye that kind o' looks into you. It don't seem to me
that he ever says much, but he has an easy swing, that
makes people think he knows every thing, and isn't
afraid. I've always had a notion, too, that he wears a
thundering big gold watch-chain, and a seal with a kind
of red stone in it. I ain't certain about the stone, but
it's red or yellow, I'll bet my head.” Then Cheek

scratched the head that he was so willing to risk, and
added, “I don't know—you can't tell about these
women. Sometimes the best of 'em will take a shine
to a little, flirtin', fiddlin' snip, and be so tickled with him,
they don't know nothing what to do with themselves.”

Frank Sargent laughed with a “haw-haw,” that
made the woods ring. “Capital hit!” said he. “Capital
hit!” Then he laughed again.

“What are you laughing at?” inquired Cheek, dubiously.

“Oh! nothing. I—I was wondering whether I could
guess as nearly the appearance of a girl in Crampton,
or on the road, that swears by the driver of this coach.”

“Well, go in!” said Cheek, taking a squint across
the top of a maple.

Mr. Frank Sargent very good-naturedly “went in,”
in these words: “She's a long girl, with blue eyes, about
a head taller than you are; sings in the choir without
opening her teeth; writes verses about flowers and
clouds, and children that die with the measles, and
works samplers.”

“Now, what's the use of running a feller?” said
Cheek. “You know you ain't within gun-shot.”

“Well, tell me all about her, then,” said the publisher,
who was willing to do any thing to pass away the time.

“She's no such kind of a bird as you've been talking
about, I tell you. She's right—she is. You can't hardly
tally how she's coming out, because she isn't exactly a
woman yet. She's kind o' betwixt hay and grass, you
know—got on long dresses, but looks odd in 'em.”

“She must be very young,” remarked Cheek's muchamused
auditor.

“Young, but not green,” said Cheek. “She's got an
eye that snaps like that,” and he illustrated her visual
peculiarity by cracking his whip in the immediate vicinity
of his horses' ears. “She's waiting for me, you
know,” continued the communicative lover, “and I'm
beauing her round, and sort o' bringing her up. If I
hadn't taken her young, I never should do any thing with
her in the world. It's just with women as it is with
colts. You want to halter-break 'em when they're little,
and get 'em kind o' wonted to the feel of the harness,
and then, when they're grown up, they're all ready to
drive. She's one of them high-strung creatures—all
full of fuss and steel springs—that'll take a taut rein, I
tell you, when her blood's up. She's just like her
mother.”

“Got a smart mother, has she?”

“Yes, sir. No mistake about that. Oh! she's just
as full of jasm!”

Frank Sargent laughed again. “You've got the
start of me,” said he. “Now tell me what `jasm'
is.”

“Well, that's a sort of word, I guess, that made itself,”
said Cheek. “It's a good one, though—jasm is.
If you'll take thunder and lightning, and a steamboat and
a buzz-saw, and mix 'em up, and put 'em into a woman,
that's jasm. Now my girl is just like her mother, and
it's a real providence that I got hold of her as I did, for
if she'd run five years longer without any halter, she'd
have been too much for me—yes, sir.”

At this point of the conversation, the spire of the
Crampton church came boldly into sight, and the laugh
that rose to the young publisher's lips died away as if

his mouth had been smitten. A great crisis in his life
was doubtless before him. A great question was to be
decided. He was to meet again one whom he loved almost
idolatrously—one whom circumstances had hidden
from his vision and withheld from his embrace with
threats of eternal separation. He felt his heart thumping
heavily against its walls, and trembled with excitement.

“Stop at the hotel?” inquired Cheek, who had been
struck with his passenger's sudden silence.

“Take my baggage there, and me to Dr. Gilbert's,”
was the reply.

Then Cheek took from its pocket the little horn
which daily proclaimed to the people of Crampton that
the mail was in, or coming in, and blew a most ingenious
refrain—the instrument leaping out into various
angular flourishes, as if a fish-horn had got above its
business, and were ambitious of the reputation of a
key-bugle.

“That's Dr. Gilbert's house,” said Cheek, putting his
horses into a run. Mr. Frank Sargent was pale. He
looked at the house. He saw the door partly open, and
caught a glimpse of a woman's face and form. The horses
were pulled up at the gate with a grand flourish, and the
passenger leaped from the box; but before he had advanced
a rod, Mary was on her way to meet him. They
rushed into each other's arms, and stood for a minute
weeping, without a thought of the eyes that were upon
them. Aunt Catharine was at the window, crying like
a child. Fanny was wild with excitement, and ran down
the walk to meet the lovers.

During all this scene, the Crampton coach stood very

still, and its driver's eyes were very wide open. He
sat and watched all parties until they entered the house;
then, turning to his horses, and reining them homeward,
he gave vent to his astonishment by the double-shotted
exclamation—“Christopher Jerusalem!”