University of Virginia Library

11. CHAPTER XI.
COUSIN RICHARD'S VISIT.

The Doctor was roused from his reverie by the
clatter of approaching hoofs. He looked forward
and saw a young fellow galloping rapidly towards
him.

A common New-England rider with his toes
turned out, his elbows jerking and the daylight
showing under him at every step, bestriding a
cantering beast of the plebeian breed, thick at
every point where he should be thin, and thin at
every point where he should be thick, is not one
of those noble objects that bewitch the world.
The best horsemen outside of the cities are the
unshod country-boys, who ride “bare-back,” with
only a halter round the horse's neck, digging their
brown heels into his ribs, and slanting over backwards,
but sticking on like leeches, and taking the
hardest trot as if they loved it. This was a different
sight on which the Doctor was looking.
The streaming mane and tail of the unshorn,
savage-looking, black horse, the dashing grace
with which the young fellow in the shadowy sombrero,
and armed with the huge spurs, sat in his

high-peaked saddle, could belong only to the
mustang of the Pampas and his master. This
bold rider was a young man whose sudden apparition
in the quiet inland town had reminded some
of the good people of a bright, curly-haired boy
they had known some eight or ten years before as
little Dick Venner.

This boy had passed several of his early years
at the Dudley mansion, the playmate of Elsie,
being her cousin, two or three years older than
herself, the son of Captain Richard Venner, a
South American trader, who, as he changed his
residence often, was glad to leave the boy in his
brother's charge. The Captain's wife, this boy's
mother, was a lady of Buenos Ayres, of Spanish
descent, and had died while the child was in his
cradle. These two motherless children were as
strange a pair as one roof could well cover. Both
handsome, wild, impetuous, unmanageable, they
played and fought together like two young leopards,
beautiful, but dangerous, their lawless instincts
showing through all their graceful movements.

The boy was little else than a young Gaucho
when he first came to Rockland; for he had
learned to ride almost as soon as to walk, and
could jump on his pony and trip up a runaway
pig with the bolas or noose him with his miniature
lasso at an age when some city-children
would hardly be trusted out of sight of a nursery-maid.
It makes men imperious to sit a horse;

no man governs his fellows so well as from this
living throne. And so, from Marcus Aurelius in
Roman bronze, down to the “man on horseback”
in General Cushing's prophetic speech, the saddle
has always been the true seat of empire. The
absolute tyranny of the human will over a noble
and powerful beast develops the instinct of personal
prevalence and dominion; so that horse-subduer
and hero were almost synonymous in
simpler times, and are closely related still. An
ancestry of wild riders naturally enough bequeaths
also those other tendencies which we
see in the Tartars, the Cossacks, and our own
Indian Centaurs, — and as well, perhaps, in the
old-fashioned fox-hunting squire as in any of
these. Sharp alternations of violent action and
self-indulgent repose; a hard run, and a long
revel after it: this is what over-much horse tends
to animalize a man into. Such antecedents may
have helped to make little Dick Venner a self-willed,
capricious boy, and a rough playmate for
Elsie.

Elsie was the wilder of the two. Old Sophy,
who used to watch them with those quick, animal-looking
eyes of hers, — she was said to be
the granddaughter of a cannibal chief, and inherited
the keen senses belonging to all creatures
which are hunted as game, — Old Sophy, who
watched them in their play and their quarrels, always
seemed to be more afraid for the boy than
the girl. “Massa Dick! Massa Dick! don' you

be too rough wi' dat gal! She scratch you las'
week, 'n' some day she bite you; 'n' if she bite you,
Massa Dick!” Old Sophy nodded her head ominously,
as if she could say a great deal more;
while, in grateful acknowledgement of her caution,
Master Dick put his two little fingers in the
angles of his mouth, and his forefingers on his
lower eyelids, drawing upon these features until
his expression reminded her of something she
vaguely recollected in her infancy, — the face of
a favorite deity executed in wood by an African
artist for her grandfather, brought over by her
mother, and burned when she became a Christian.

These two wild children had much in common.
They loved to ramble together, to build huts, to
climb trees for nests, to ride the colts, to dance, to
race, and to play at boys' rude games as if both
were boys. But wherever two natures have a
great deal in common, the conditions of a first-rate
quarrel are furnished ready-made. Relations
are very apt to hate each other just because they
are too much alike. It is so frightful to be in an
atmosphere of family idiosyncrasies; to see all the
hereditary uncomeliness or infirmity of body, all
the defects of speech, all the failings of temper,
intensified by concentration, so that every fault of
our own finds itself multiplied by reflections, like
our images in a saloon lined with mirrors! Nature
knows what she is about. The centrifugal
principle which grows out of the antipathy of like
to like is only the repetition in character of the

arrangement we see expressed materially in certain
seed-capsules, which burst and throw the
seed to all points of the compass. A house is a
large pod with a human germ or two in each of
its cells or chambers; it opens by dehiscence of
the front-door by-and-by, and projects one of its
germs to Kansas, another to San Francisco, another
to Chicago, and so on; and this that Smith
may not be Smithed to death and Brown may
not be Browned into a mad-house, but mix in
with the world again and struggle back to average
humanity.

Elsie's father, whose fault was to indulge her in
everything, found that it would never do to let
these children grow up together. They would
either love each other as they got older, and pair
like wild creatures, or take some fierce antipathy,
which might end nobody could tell where. It was
not safe to try. The boy must be sent away. A
sharper quarrel than common decided this point.
Master Dick forgot Old Sophy's caution, and
vexed the girl into a paroxysm of wrath, in which
she sprang at him and bit his arm. Perhaps they
made too much of it; for they sent for the old
Doctor, who came at once when he heard what
had happened. He had a good deal to say about
the danger there was from the teeth of animals or
human beings when enraged; and as he emphasized
his remarks by the application of a pencil
of lunar caustic to each of the marks left by the
sharp white teeth, they were like to be remembered
by at least one of his hearers.

So Master Dick went off on his travels, which
led him into strange places and stranger company.
Elsie was half pleased and half sorry to have him
go; the children had a kind of mingled liking
and hate for each other, just such as is very common
among relations. Whether the girl had most
satisfaction in the plays they shared, or in teasing
him, or taking her small revenge upon him for
teasing her, it would have been hard to say. At
any rate, she was lonely without him. She had
more fondness for the old black woman than anybody;
but Sophy could not follow her far beyond
her own old rocking-chair. As for her father, she
had made him afraid of her, not for his sake, but
for her own. Sometimes she would seem to be
fond of him, and the parent's heart would yearn
within him as she twined her supple arms about
him; and then some look she gave him, some
half-articulated expression, would turn his cheek
pale and almost make him shiver, and he would
say kindly, “Now go, Elsie, dear,” and smile upon
her as she went, and close and lock the door softly
after her. Then his forehead would knot and furrow
itself, and the drops of anguish stand thick
upon it. He would go to the western window of
his study and look at the solitary mound with the
marble slab for its head-stone. After his grief
had had its way, he would kneel down and pray
for his child as one who has no hope save in that
special grace which can bring the most rebellious
spirit into sweet subjection. All this might seem

like weakness in a parent having the charge of
one sole daughter of his house and heart; but he
had tried authority and tenderness by turns so
long without any good effect, that he had become
sore perplexed, and, surrounding her with cautious
watchfulness as he best might, left her in the main
to her own guidance and the merciful influences
which Heaven might send down to direct her
footsteps.

Meantime the boy grew up to youth and early
manhood through a strange succession of adventures.
He had been at school at Buenos Ayres,
— had quarrelled with his mother's relatives, —
had run off to the Pampas, and lived with the
Gauchos, — had made friends with the Indians,
and ridden with them, it was rumored, in some
of their savage forays, — had returned and made
up his quarrel, — had got money by inheritance
or otherwise, — had troubled the peace of certain
magistrates, — had found it convenient to leave
the City of Wholesome Breezes for a time, and
had galloped off on a fast horse of his, (so it was
said), with some officers riding after him, who
took good care (but this was only the popular
story) not to catch him. A few days after this
he was taking his ice on the Alameda of Mendoza,
and a week or two later sailed from Valparaiso
for New York, carrying with him the
horse with which he had scampered over the
Plains, a trunk or two with his newly purchased
outfit of clothing and other conveniences, and

a belt heavy with gold and with a few Brazilian
diamonds sewed in it, enough in value to serve
him for a long journey.

Dick Venner had seen life enough to wear out
the earlier sensibilities of adolescence. He was
tired of worshipping or tyrannizing over the bistred
or umbered beauties of mingled blood among
whom he had been living. Even that piquant
exhibition which the Rio de Mendoza presents
to the amateur of breathing sculpture failed to
interest him. He was thinking of a far-off village
on the other side of the equator, and of the
wild girl with whom he used to play and quarrel,
a creature of a different race from these degenerate
mongrels.

“A game little devil she was, sure enough!”
— and as Dick spoke, he bared his wrist to look
for the marks she had left on it: two small white
scars, where the two small sharp upper teeth had
struck when she flashed at him with her eyes
sparkling as bright as those glittering stones
sewed up in the belt he wore. — “That's a filly
worth noosing!” said Dick to himself, as he
looked in admiration at the sign of her spirit
and passion. “I wonder if she will bite at
eighteen as she did at eight! She shall have
a chance to try, at any rate!”

Such was the self-sacrificing disposition with
which Richard Venner, Esq., a passenger by the
Condor from Valparaiso, set foot upon his native
shore, and turned his face in the direction of

Rockland, The Mountain and the mansion-house.
He had heard something, from time to
time, of his New-England relatives, and knew
that they were living together as he left them.
And so he heralded himself to “My dear Uncle”
by a letter signed “Your loving nephew, Richard
Venner,” in which letter he told a very frank
story of travel and mercantile adventure, expressed
much gratitude for the excellent counsel
and example which had helped to form his
character and preserve him in the midst of
temptation, inquired affectionately after his uncle's
health, was much interested to know whether
his lively cousin who used to be his playmate
had grown up as handsome as she promised to
be, and announced his intention of paying his
respects to them both at Rockland. Not long
after this came the trunks marked R. V. which
he had sent before him, forerunners of his advent:
he was not going to wait for a reply or
an invitation.

What a sound that is, — the banging down
of the preliminary trunk, without its claimant
to give it the life which is borrowed by all personal
appendages, so long as the owner's hand
or eye is on them! If it announce the coming
of one loved and longed for, how we delight to
look at it, to sit down on it, to caress it in our
fancies, as a lone exile walking out on a windy
pier yearns towards the merchantman lying alongside,
with the colors of his own native land at her

peak, and the name of the port he sailed from
long ago upon her stern! But if it tell the near
approach of the undesired, inevitable guest, what
sound short of the muffled noises made by the
undertakers as they turn the corners in the dim-lighted
house, with low shuffle of feet and whispered
cautions, carries such a sense of knocking-kneed
collapse with it as the thumping down
in the front entry of the heavy portmanteau,
rammed with the changes of uncounted coming
weeks?

Whether the R. V. portmanteaus brought one
or the other of these emotions to the tenants of
the Dudley mansion, it might not be easy to
settle. Elsie professed to be pleased with the
thought of having an adventurous young stranger,
with stories to tell, an inmate of their quiet,
not to say dull, family. Under almost any other
circumstances, her father would have been unwilling
to take a young fellow of whom he knew
so little under his roof; but this was his nephew,
and anything that seemed like to amuse or please
Elsie was agreeable to him. He had grown almost
desperate, and felt as if any change in the
current of her life and feelings might save her
from some strange paroxysm of dangerous mental
exaltation or sullen perversion of disposition,
from which some fearful calamity might come
to herself or others.

Dick had been several weeks at the Dudley
mansion. A few days before, he had made a

sudden dash for the nearest large city, — and
when the Doctor met him, he was just returning
from his visit.

It had been a curious meeting between the
two young persons, who had parted so young
and after such strange relations with each other.
When Dick first presented himself at the mansion,
not one in the house would have known
him for the boy who had left them all so suddenly
years ago. He was so dark, partly from
his descent, partly from long habits of exposure,
that Elsie looked almost fair beside him. He
had something of the family beauty which belonged
to his cousin, but his eye had a fierce
passion in it, very unlike the cold glitter of
Elsie's. Like many people of strong and imperious
temper, he was soft-voiced and very
gentle in his address, when he had no special
reason for being otherwise. He soon found reasons
enough to be as amiable as he could force
himself to be with his uncle and his cousin.
Elsie was to his fancy. She had a strange attraction
for him, quite unlike anything he had
ever known in other women. There was something,
too, in early associations: when those who
parted as children meet as man and woman, there
is always a renewal of that early experience
which followed the taste of the forbidden fruit,
— a natural blush of consciousness, not without
its charm.

Nothing could be more becoming than the behavior
of “Richard Venner, Esquire, the guest of
Dudley Venner, Esquire, at his noble mansion,”
as he was announced in the Court column of the
“Rockland Weekly Universe.” He was pleased
to find himself treated with kindness and attention
as a relative. He made himself very agreeable
by abundant details concerning the religious,
political, social, commercial, and educational
progress of the South American cities and
states. He was himself much interested in
everything that was going on about the Dudley
mansion, walked all over it, noticed its valuable
wood-lots with special approbation, was delighted
with the grand old house and its furniture, and
would not be easy until he had seen all the
family silver and heard its history. In return,
he had much to tell of his father, now dead, —
the only one of the Venners, beside themselves,
in whose fate his uncle was interested. With
Elsie, he was subdued and almost tender in his
manner; with the few visitors whom they saw,
shy and silent, — perhaps a little watchful, if any
young man happened to be among them.

Young fellows placed on their good behavior
are apt to get restless and nervous, all ready
to fly off into some mischief or other. Dick
Venner had his half-tamed horse with him to
work off his suppressed life with. When the
savage passion of his young blood came over
him, he would fetch out the mustang, screaming

and kicking as these amiable beasts are wont to
do, strap the Spanish saddle tight to his back,
vault into it, and, after getting away from the
village, strike the long spurs into his sides and
whirl away in a wild gallop, until the black horse
was flecked with white foam, and the cruel steel
points were red with his blood. When horse
and rider were alike tired, he would fling the
bridle on his neck and saunter homeward, always
contriving to get to the stable in a quiet
way, and coming into the house as calm as
a bishop after a sober trot on his steady-going
cob.

After a few weeks of this kind of life, he began
to want some more fierce excitement. He had
tried making downright love to Elsie, with no
great success as yet, in his own opinion. The
girl was capricious in her treatment of him, sometimes
scowling and repellent, sometimes familiar,
very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and
malicious. All this, perhaps, made her more interesting
to a young man who was tired of easy
conquests. There was a strange fascination in
her eyes, too, which at times was quite irresistible,
so that he would feel himself drawn to her
by a power which seemed to take away his will
for the moment. It may have been nothing but
the common charm of bright eyes; but he had
never before experienced the same kind of attraction.

Perhaps she was not so very different from

what she had been as a child, after all. At any
rate, so it seemed to Dick Venner, who, as was
said before, had tried making love to her. They
were sitting alone in the study one day; Elsie
had round her neck that somewhat peculiar ornament,
the golden torque, which she had worn to
the great party. Youth is adventurous and very
curious about necklaces, brooches, chains, and
other such adornments, so long as they are worn
by young persons of the female sex. Dick was
seized with a great passion for examining this
curious chain, and, after some preliminary questions,
was rash enough to lean towards her and
put out his hand toward the neck that lay in the
golden coil. She threw her head back, her eyes
narrowing and her forehead drawing down so
that Dick thought her head actually flattened
itself. He started involuntarily; for she looked
so like the little girl who had struck him with
those sharp flashing teeth, that the whole scene
came back, and he felt the stroke again as if it
had just been given, and the two white scars
began to sting as they did after the old Doctor
had burned them with that stick of gray caustic,
which looked so like a slate pencil, and felt so
much like the end of a red-hot poker.

It took something more than a gallop to set
him right after this. The next day he mentioned
having received a letter from a mercantile agent
with whom he had dealings. What his business
was is, perhaps, none of our business. At

any rate, it required him to go at once to the
city where his correspondent resided.

Independently of this “business” which called
him, there may have been other motives, such as
have been hinted at. People who have been
living for a long time in dreary country-places,
without any emotion beyond such as are occasioned
by a trivial pleasure or annoyance, often
get crazy at last for a vital paroxysm of some
kind or other. In this state they rush to the
great cities for a plunge into their turbid life-baths,
with a frantic thirst for every exciting
pleasure, which makes them the willing and easy
victims of all those who sell the Devil's wares
on commission. The less intelligent and instructed
class of unfortunates, who venture with
their ignorance and their instincts into what is
sometimes called the “life” of great cities, are
put through a rapid course of instruction which
entitles them very commonly to a diploma from
the police court. But they only illustrate the
working of the same tendency in mankind at
large which has been occasionally noticed in the
sons of ministers and other eminently worthy
people, by many ascribed to that intense congenital
hatred for goodness which distinguishes
human nature from that of the brute, but perhaps
as readily accounted for by considering it
as the yawning and stretching of a young soul
cramped too long in one moral posture.

Richard Venner was a young man of remarkable

experience for his years. He ran less risk,
therefore, in exposing himself to the temptations
and dangers of a great city than many older men,
who, seeking the livelier scenes of excitement to
be found in large towns as a relaxation after the
monotonous routine of family-life, are too often
taken advantage of and made the victims of their
sentiments or their generous confidence in their
fellow-creatures. Such was not his destiny. There
was something about him which looked as if he
would not take bullying kindly. He had also
the advantage of being acquainted with most of
those ingenious devices by which the proverbial
inconstancy of fortune is steadied to something
more nearly approaching fixed laws, and the dangerous
risks which have so often led young men
to ruin and suicide are practically reduced to
somewhat less than nothing. So that Mr. Richard
Venner worked off his nervous energies without
any troublesome adventure, and was ready
to return to Rockland in less than a week, without
having lightened the money-belt he wore
round his body, or tarnished the long glittering
knife he carried in his boot.

Dick had sent his trunk to the nearest town
through which the railroad leading to the city
passed. He rode off on his black horse and left
him at the place where he took the cars. On arriving
at the city station, he took a coach and
drove to one of the great hotels. Thither drove
also a sagacious-looking, middle-aged man, who

entered his name as “W. Thompson” in the book
at the office immediately after that of “R. Venner.”
Mr. “Thompson” kept a carelessly observant
eye upon Mr. Venner during his stay at
the hotel, and followed him to the cars when he
left, looking over his shoulder when he bought
his ticket at the station, and seeing him fairly
off without obtruding himself in any offensive
way upon his attention. Mr. Thompson, known
in other quarters as Detective Policeman Terry,
got very little by his trouble. Richard Venner
did not turn out to be the wife-poisoner, the
defaulting cashier, the river-pirate, or the great
counterfeiter. He paid his hotel-bill as a gentleman
should always do, if he has the money,
and can spare it. The detective had probably
overrated his own sagacity when he ventured to
suspect Mr. Venner. He reported to his chief
that there was a knowing-looking fellow he had
been round after, but he rather guessed he was
nothing more than “one o' them Southern sportsmen.”

The poor fellows at the stable where Dick
had left his horse had had trouble enough with
him. One of the ostlers was limping about with
a lame leg, and another had lost a mouthful of
his coat, which came very near carrying a piece
of his shoulder with it. When Mr. Venner came
back for his beast, he was as wild as if he had
just been lassoed, screaming, kicking, rolling
over to get rid of his saddle, — and when his

rider was at last mounted, jumping about in a
way to dislodge any common horseman. To
all this Dick replied by sticking his long spurs
deeper and deeper into his flanks, until the creature
found he was mastered, and dashed off as
if all the thistles of the Pampas were pricking
him.

“One more gallop, Juan!” This was in the
last mile of the road before he came to the town
which brought him in sight of the mansion-house.
It was in this last gallop that the fiery mustang
and his rider flashed by the old Doctor. Cassia
pointed her sharp ears and shied to let them
pass. The Doctor turned and looked through
the little round glass in the back of his sulky.

“Dick Turpin, there, will find more than his
match!” said the Doctor.