 | Marjorie Daw, and other people |  |
2. A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE.
1. I.
AT five o'clock on the morning of the tenth
of July, 1860, the front door of a certain
house on Anchor Street, in the ancient seaport
town of Rivermouth, might have been observed
to open with great caution. This door, as the
least imaginative reader may easily conjecture,
did not open itself. It was opened by Miss Margaret
Callaghan, who immediately closed it softly
behind her, paused for a few seconds with an
embarrassed air on the stone step, and then,
throwing a furtive glance up at the second-story
windows, passed hastily down the street towards
the river, keeping close to the fences and garden
walls on her left.
There was a ghostlike stealthiness to Miss Margaret's
movements, though there was nothing
She was a plump, short person, no longer
young, with coal-black hair growing low on the
forehead, and a round face that would have
been nearly meaningless if the features had not
been emphasized — italicized, so to speak — by
the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her
toilet would have rendered any ghostly hypothesis
untenable. Mrs. Solomon — we refer to the
dressiest Mrs. Solomon, which ever one that was
— in all her glory was not arrayed like Miss
Margaret on that eventful summer morning.
She wore a light-green, shot-silk frock, a blazing
red shawl, and a yellow crape bonnet profusely
decorated with azure, orange, and magenta
artificial flowers. In her hand she carried a
white parasol. The newly risen sun, ricocheting
from the bosom of the river and striking point-blank
on the top-knot of Miss Margaret's gorgeousness,
made her an imposing spectacle in
the quiet street of that Puritan village. But, in
spite of the bravery of her apparel, she stole
guiltily along by garden walls and fences until
she reached a small, dingy framehouse near the
wharves, in the darkened doorway of which she
figure is permissible.
Three quarters of an hour passed. The sunshine
moved slowly up Anchor Street, fingered
noiselessly the well-kept brass knockers on either
side, and drained the heeltaps of dew which had
been left from the revels of the fairies overnight
in the cups of the morning-glories. Not a soul
was stirring yet in this part of the town, though
the Rivermouthians are such early birds that not
a worm may be said to escape them. By and by
one of the brown Holland shades at one of the
upper windows of the Bilkins mansion — the
house from which Miss Margaret had emerged —
was drawn up, and old Mr. Bilkins in spiral
nightcap looked out on the sunny street. Not
a living creature was to be seen, save the dissipated
family cat, — a very Lovelace of a cat that
was not allowed a night-key, — who was sitting
on the curbstone opposite, waiting for the hall
door to be opened. Three quarters of an hour,
we repeat, had passed, when Mrs. Margaret
O'Rouke, née Callaghan, issued from the small,
dingy house by the river, and regained the door-step
of the Bilkins mansion in the same stealthy
fashion in which she had left it.
Not to prolong a mystery that must already
oppress the reader, Mr. Bilkins's cook had, after
the manner of her kind, stolen out of the premises
before the family were up, and got herself
married, — surreptitiously and artfully married,
as if matrimony were an indicatable offence.
And something of an offence it was in this
instance. In the first place, Margaret Callaghan
had lived nearly twenty years with the Bilkins
family, and the old people — there were no children
now — had rewarded this long service by
taking Margaret into their affections. It was
a piece of subtile ingratitude for her to marry
without admitting the worthy couple to her confidence.
In the next place, Margaret had married
a man some eighteen years younger than
herself. That was the young man's lookout, you
say. We hold it was Margaret that was to
blame. What does a young blade of twenty-two
know? Not half so much as he thinks he does.
His exhaustless ignorance at that age is a discovery
which is left for him to make in his
prime.
Billing and cooing is all your cheer;
Under Bonnybell's window panes, —
Wait till you come to Forty Year!”
In one sense Margaret's husband had come
to forty year, — she was forty to a day.
Mrs. Margaret O'Rouke, with the baddish cat
following closely at her heels, entered the Bilkins
mansion, reached her chamber in the attic without
being intercepted, and there laid aside her
finery. Two or three times, while arranging her
more humble attire, she paused to take a look at
the marriage certificate, which she had deposited
between the leaves of her Prayer-Book, and on
each occasion held that potent document upside
down; for Margaret's literary culture was of the
severest order, and excluded the art of reading.
The breakfast was late that morning. As
Mrs. O'Rouke set the coffee-urn in front of Mrs.
Bilkins and flanked Mr. Bilkins with the broiled
mackerel and the buttered toasts, Mrs. O'Rouke's
conscience smote her. She afterwards declared
that when she saw the two sitting there so innocent-like,
not dreaming of the comether she had
put upon them, she secretly and unbeknownt let a
few tears fall into the cream-pitcher. Whether or
penitence that spoiled the coffee, does not admit
of inquiry; but the coffee was bad. In fact, the
whole breakfast was a comedy of errors.
It was a blessed relief to Margaret when the meal was ended. She retired in a cold perspiration
to the penetralia of the kitchen, and it was
remarked by both Mr. and Mrs. Bilkins that
those short flights of vocalism, — apropos of the
personal charms of one Kate Kearney who lived
on the banks of Killarney, — which ordinarily
issued from the direction of the scullery, were
unheard that forenoon.
The town clock was striking eleven, and the
antiquated timepiece on the staircase (which
never spoke but it dropped pearls and crystals,
like the fairy in the story) was lisping the hour,
when there came three tremendous knocks at the
street door. Mrs. Bilkins, who was dusting the
brass-mounted chronometer in the hall, stood
transfixed with arm uplifted. The admirable old
lady had for years been carrying on a guerilla
warfare with itinerant vendors of furniture polish,
and pain-killer, and crockery cement, and
the like. The effrontery of the triple knock convinced
that dissolute creature with twenty-four
sheets of note-paper and twenty-four envelopes
for fifteen cents.
Mrs. Bilkins swept across the hall, and opened
the door with a jerk. The suddenness of the
movement was apparently not anticipated by the
person outside, who, with one arm stretched feebly
towards the receding knocker, tilted gently
forward, and rested both hands on the threshold
in an attitude which was probably common
enough with our ancestors of the Simian period,
but could never have been considered graceful.
By an effort that testified to the excellent condition
of his muscles, the person instantly righted
himself, and stood swaying unsteadily on his toes
and heels, and smiling rather vaguely on Mrs.
Bilkins.
It was a slightly built, but well-knitted young
fellow in the not unpicturesque garb of our
marine service. His woollen cap, pitched forward
at an acute angle with his nose, showed
the back part of a head thatched with short,
yellow hair, which had broken into innumerable
curls of painful tightness. On his ruddy cheeks
Add to this a weak, good-natured mouth, a pair
of devil-may-care blue eyes, and the fact that the
man was very drunk, and you have a pre-Raphaelite
portrait — we may as well say it at once —
of Mr. Larry O'Rouke of Ballyshanty, County
Connaught, and late of the U. S. sloop-of-war
Santee.
The man was a total stranger to Mrs. Bilkins;
but the instant she caught sight of the double
white anchors embroidered on the lapels of his
jacket, she unhesitatingly threw back the door,
which, with great presence of mind, she had
partly closed.
A drunken sailor standing on the step of the
Bilkins mansion was no novelty. The street, as
we have stated, led down to the wharves, and
sailors were constantly passing. The house
abutted directly on the street; the granite door-step
was almost flush with the sidewalk, and the
huge old-fashioned brass knocker — seemingly a
brazen hand that had been cut off at the wrist,
and nailed against the oak as a warning to malefactors
— extended itself in a kind of grim appeal
to everybody. It seemed to possess strange
there was a man-of-war in port the rat-tat-tat of
that knocker would frequently startle the quiet
neighborhood long after midnight. There appeared
to be an occult understanding between it
and the blue-jackets. Years ago there was a
young Bilkins, one Pendexter Bilkins, — a sad
losel, we fear, — who ran away to try his fortunes
before the mast, and fell overboard in a
gale off Hatteras. “Lost at sea,” says the chubby
marble slab in the Old South Burying-Ground,
“ætat 18.” Perhaps that is why no blue-jacket,
sober or drunk, was ever repulsed from the door
of the Bilkins mansion.
Of course Mrs. Bilkins had her taste in the
matter, and preferred them sober. But as this
could not always be, she tempered her wind, so
to speak, to the shorn lamb. The flushed, prematurely
old face that now looked up at her
moved the good lady's pity.
“What do you want?” she asked kindly.
“Me wife.”
“There's no wife for you here,” said Mrs.
Bilkins, somewhat taken aback. “His wife!”
she thought; “it's a mother the poor boy stands
in need of.”
“Me wife,” repeated Mr. O'Rouke, “for betther
or for worse.”
“You had better go away,” said Mrs. Bilkins,
bridling up, “or it will be the worse for you.”
“To have and to howld,” continued Mr.
O'Rouke, wandering retrospectively in the mazes
of the marriage service, “to have and to howld,
till death — bad luck to him! — takes one or the
ither of us.”
“You're a blasphemous creature,” said Mrs.
Bilkins, severely.
“Thim's the words his riverince spake this mornin',
standin' foreninst us,” explained Mr. O'Rouke. “I stood here,
see, and me jew'l stood there, and the howly chaplain beyont.”
And Mr. O'Rouke with a wavering forefinger
drew a diagram of the interesting situation on
the doorstep.
“Well,” returned Mrs. Bilkins, “if you're a
married man, all I have to say is, there's a pair
of fools instead of one. You had better be off;
the person you want does n't live here.”
“Bedad, thin, but she does.”
“Lives here?”
“Sorra a place else.”
“The man's crazy,” said Mrs. Bilkins to
herself.
While she thought him simply drunk she was
not in the least afraid; but the idea that she
was conversing with a madman sent a chill over
her. She reached back her hand preparatory to
shutting the door, when Mr. O'Rouke, with an
agility that might have been expected from his
previous gymnastics, set one foot on the threshold
and frustrated the design.
“I want me wife,” he said sternly.
Unfortunately Mr. Bilkins had gone up town,
and there was no one in the house except Margaret,
whose pluck was not to be depended on.
The case was urgent. With the energy of despair
Mrs. Bilkins suddenly placed the toe of her
boot against Mr. O'Rouke's invading foot, and
pushed it away. The effect of this attack was
to cause Mr. O'Rouke to describe a complete
circle on one leg, and then sit down heavily on
the threshold. The lady retreated to the hatstand,
and rested her hand mechanically on the
handle of a blue cotton umbrella. Mr. O'Rouke
partly turned his head and smiled upon her with
conscious superiority. At this juncture a third
of Mr. O'Rouke, for he addressed that gentleman
as “a sapleen,” and told him to go home.
“Divil an inch,” replied the sapleen; but he
got himself off the threshold, and resumed his
position on the step.
“It's only Larry, mum,” said the man; touching
his forelock politely; “as dacent a lad as
iver lived, when he's not in liquor; an' I've
known him to be sober for days togither,” he
added reflectively. “He don't mane a hap'orth
a' harum, but jist now he's not quite in his
right moind.”
“I should think not,” said Mrs. Bilkins, turning
from the speaker to Mr. O'Rouke, who had
seated himself gravely on the scraper, and was
weeping. “Has n't the man any friends?”
“Too many of 'em, mum, an' it's along wid
dhrinkin' toasts wid'em that Larry got throwed.
The punch that sapleen has dhrunk this day
would amaze ye. He give us the slip awhiles
ago, bad 'cess to him, an' come up here. Did
n't I tell ye, Larry, not to be afther ringin' at
the owld gintleman's knocker? Ain't ye got no
sinse at all?”
“Misther Donnehugh,” said Mr. O'Rouke with
great dignity, “ye're dhrunk agin.”
Mr. Donnehugh, who had not taken more than
thirteen ladles of rum-punch, disdained to reply
directly.
“He's a dacent lad enough,” — this to Mrs.
Bilkins, — “but his head is wake. Whin he's
had two sups o' whiskey he belaves he's dhrank
a bar'l full. A gill o' wather out of a jimmy-john'd
fuddle him, mum.”
“Is n't there anybody to look after him?”
“No, mum, he's an orphan; his father and
mother live in the owld counthry, an' a fine hale
owld couple they are.”
“Has n't he any family in the town —”
“Sure, mum, he has a family; was n't he
married this blessed mornin'?”
“He said so.”
“Indade, thin, he was, — the pore divil!”
“And the — the person?” inquired Mrs.
Bilkins.
“Is it the wife ye mane?”
“Yes, the wife: where is she?”
“Well thin, mum,” said Mr. Donnehugh,
“it's yerself that can answer that.”
“I?” exclaimed Mrs. Bilkins. “Good heavens!
this man's as crazy as the other!”
“Begorra, if anybody's crazy it's Larry, for
it's Larry has married Margaret.”
“What Margaret?” cried Mrs. Bilkins with
a start.
“Margaret Callaghan, sure.”
“Our Margaret? Do you mean to say that
OUR Margaret has married that—that good-for
nothing, inebriated wretch!”
“It's a civil tongue the owld lady has, anyway,”
remarked Mr. O'Rouke, critically, from
the scraper.
Mrs. Bilkins's voice during the latter part of
the colloquy had been pitched in a high key;
it rung through the hall and penetrated to the
kitchen, where Margaret was thoughtfully wiping
the breakfast things. She paused with a half-dried
saucer in her hand, and listened. In a
moment more she stood, with bloodless face and
limp figure, leaning against the banister, behind
Mrs. Bilkins.
“Is it there ye are, me jew'l!” cries Mr.
O'Rouke, discovering her.
Mrs. Bilkins wheeled upon Margaret.
“Margaret Callaghan, is that thing your
husband?”
“Ye-yes, mum,” faltered Mrs. O'Rouke, with
a woful lack of spirit.
“Then take it away!” cried Mrs. Bilkins.
Margaret, with a slight flush on either cheek,
glided past Mrs. Bilkins, and the heavy oak door
closed with a bang, as the gates of Paradise
must have closed of old upon Adam and Eve.
“Come!” said Margaret, taking Mr. O'Rouke
by the hand; and the two wandered forth upon
their wedding-journey down Anchor Street, with
all the world before them where to choose. They
chose to halt at the small, shabby tenement-house
by the river, through the doorway of which the
bridal pair disappeared with a reeling, eccentric
gait; for Mr. O'Rouke's intoxication seemed to
have run down his elbow, and communicated
itself to Margaret.
O Hymen! who burnest precious gums and
scented woods in thy torch at the melting of
aristocratic hearts, with what a pitiful penny-dip
thou hast lighted up our matter-of-fact romance!
2. II.
It had been no part of Margaret's plan to
acknowledge the marriage so soon. Though on
pleasure bent, she had a frugal mind. She had
invested in a husband with a view of laying him
away for a rainy day, that is to say, for such time
as her master and mistress should cease to need
her services; for she had promised on more than
one occasion to remain with the old people as
long as they lived. And, indeed, if Mr. O'Rouke
had come to her and said in so many words,
“The day you marry me you must leave the Bilkins
family,” there is very little doubt but Margaret
would have let that young sea-monster slip
back unmated, so far as she was concerned, into his
native element. The contingency never entered
into her calculations. She intended that the ship
which had brought Ulysses to her island should
take him off again after a decent interval of honeymoon;
then she would confess all to Mrs. Bilkins,
and be forgiven, and Mr. Bilkins would not
bequeathing two first-mortgage bonds of the
Squedunk R. R. Co. to a certain faithful servant.
In the mean while she would add each month to
her store in the coffers of the Rivermouth Savings
Bank; for Calypso had a neat sum to her
credit on the books of that provident institution.
But this could not be now. The volatile bride-groom
had upset the wisely conceived plan, and
“all the fat was in the fire,” as Margaret philosophically
put it. Mr. O'Rouke had been fully
instructed in the part he was to play, and, to do
him justice, had honestly intended to play it;
but destiny was against him. It may be observed
that destiny and Mr. O'Rouke were not on very
friendly terms.
After the ceremony had been performed and
Margaret had stolen back to the Bilkins mansion,
as related, Mr. O'Rouke with his own skilful
hands had brewed a noble punch for the wedding
guests. Standing at the head of the table and
stirring the pungent mixture in a small wash-tub
purchased for the occasion, Mr. O'Rouke came
out in full flower. His flow of wit, as he replenished
the glasses, was as racy and seemingly as
McLaughlin held out her glass, inadvertently upside
down, for her sixth ladleful, Mr. O'Rouke
gallantly declared it should be filled if he had to
stand on his head to do it. The elder Miss
O'Leary whispered to Mrs. Connally that Mr.
O'Rouke was “a perfic gintleman,” and the men
in a body pronounced him a bit of the raal shamrock.
If Mr. O'Rouke was happy in brewing a
punch, he was happier in dispensing it, and happiest
of all in drinking a great deal of it himself.
He toasted Mrs. Finnigan, the landlady, and the
late lamented Finnigan, the father, whom he had
never seen, and Miss Biddy Finnigan, the daughter,
and a young toddling Finnigan, who was at
large in shockingly scant raiment. He drank to
the company individually and collectively, drank
to the absent, drank to a tin-pedler who chanced
to pass the window, and indeed was in that propitiatory
mood when he would have drunk to the
health of each separate animal that came out of
the Ark. It was in the midst of the confusion
and applause which followed his song, “The
Wearing of the Grane,” that Mr. O'Rouke, the
punch being all gone, withdrew unobserved and
the reader knows.
According to the love-idyl of the period, when
Laura and Charles Henry, after unheard-of obstacles,
are finally united, all cares and tribulations
and responsibilities slip from their sleek
backs like Christian's burden. The idea is a
pretty one, theoretically, but, like some of those
models in the Patent Office at Washington, it
does n't work. Charles Henry does not go on
sitting at Laura's feet and reading Timothy Titcomb
to her forever: the rent of the cottage by
the sea falls due with prosaic regularity; there
are bakers, and butchers, and babies, and tax-collectors,
and doctors, and undertakers, and sometimes
gentlemen of the jury to be attended to.
Wedded life is not one long amatory poem with
recurrent rhymes of love and dove, and kiss and
bliss. Yet when the average sentimental novelist
has supplied his hero and heroine with their
bridal outfit and attended to that little matter of
the marriage certificate, he usually turns off the
gas, puts up his shutters, and saunters off with
his hands in his pockets, as if the day's business
life and disdain to give short weight, know better.
The business is by no means over: it is just begun.
It is not Christian throwing off his pack for
good and all, but Christian taking up a load heavier
and more difficult than any he has carried.
If Margaret Callaghan, when she mediated
matrimony, indulged in any roseate dreams, they
were quickly put to flight. She suddenly found
herself dispossessed of a quiet, comfortable home,
and face to face with the fact that she had a white
elephant on her hands. It is not likely that Mr.
O'Rouke assumed precisely the shape of a white
elephant to her mental vision; but he was as useless
and cumbersome and unmanageable as one.
Margaret and Larry's wedding-tour did not
extend beyond Mrs. Finnigan's establishment,
where they took two or three rooms and set up
housekeeping in a humble way. Margaret, who
was a tidy housewife, kept the floor of her apartments
as white as your hand, the tin plates on
the dresser as bright as your lady-love's eyes, and
the cooking-stove as neat as the machinery on a
Sound steamer. When she was not rubbing the
stove with lamp-black she was cooking upon it
monster. Naturally of a hopeful temperament,
she went about her work singing softly to
herself at times, and would have been very happy
that first week if Mr. O'Rouke had known a sober
moment. But Mr. O'Rouke showed an exasperating
disposition to keep up festivities. At the
end of ten days, however, he toned down, and at
Margaret's suggestion that he had better be looking
about for some employment, he rigged himself
up a fishing-pole and set out with an injured
air for the wharf at the foot of the street, where
he fished for the rest of the day. To sit for
hours blinking in the sun, waiting for a cunner
to come along and take his hook, was as exhaustive
a kind of labor as he cared to engage in.
Though Mr. O'Rouke had recently returned from
a long cruise, he had not a cent to show. During
his first three days ashore he had dissipated
his three years' pay. The housekeeping expenses
began eating a hole in Margaret's little fund, the
existence of which was no sooner known to Mr.
O'Rouke than he stood up his fishing-rod in one
corner of the room, and thenceforth it caught
nothing but cobwebs.
“Divil a sthroke o'work I 'll do,” said Mr.
O'Rouke, “whin we can live at aise on our
earnin's. Who'd be afther frettin' hisself, wid
money in the bank? How much is it, Peggy
darlint?”
And divil a stroke more of work did he do.
He loanged down on the wharves, and, with his
short clay pipe stuck between his lips and his
hands in his pockets, stared off at the sail-boats
on the river. He sat on the doorstep of the
Finnigan domicile, and plentifully chaffed the
passers-by. Now and then, when he could wheedle
some fractional currency out of Margaret, he
spent it like a crown-prince at The Wee Drop
around the corner. With that fine magnetism
which draws together birds of a feather, he
shortly drew about him all the ne'er-do-weels of
Rivermouth. It was really wonderful what an
unsuspected lot of them there was. From all the
frowzy purlieus of the town they crept forth into
the sunlight to array themselves under the banner
of the prince of scallawags. It was edifying
of a summer afternoon to see a dozen of them
sitting in a row, like turtles, on the string-piece
of Jedediah Rand's wharf, with their twenty-four
O'Rouke in contemplating the islands in the
harbor, and upholding the scenery, as it were.
The rascal had one accomplishment, he had a
heavenly voice, quite in the rough, to be sure,
and he played on the violin like an angel. He did
not know one note from another, but he played
in a sweet natural way, just as Orpheus must
have played, by ear. The drunker he was the
more pathos and humor he wrung from the old
violin, his sole piece of personal property. He
had a singular fancy for getting up at two or
three o'clock in the morning, and playing by an
open casement. All the dogs in the immediate
neighborhood and innumerable dogs in the distance
would join to swell the chorus on a scale
that would have satisfied Mr. Gilmore himself.
Unfortunately Mr. O'Rouke's bêtises were not
always of so innocent a complexion. On one or
two occasions, through an excess of animal and
other spirits, he took to breaking windows in
the town. Among his nocturnal feats he accomplished
the demolition of the glass in the door
of The Wee Drop. Now, breaking windows in
Rivermouth is an amusement not wholly disconnected
(bridewell is the local term); so it happened
that Mr. O'Rouke woke up one fine morning and
found himself snug and tight in one of the cells
in the rear of the Brick Market. His plea that
the bull's-eye in the glass door of The Wee Drop
winked at him in an insultin' manner as he was
passing by did not prevent Justice Hackett from
fining the delinquent ten dollars and costs, which
made sad havoc with the poor wife's bank account.
So Margaret's married life wore on, and
all went merry as a funeral knell.
After Mrs. Bilkins, with a brow as severe as
one of the Parcæ, had closed the door upon the
O'Roukes that summer morning, she sat down
on the stairs, and, sinking the indignant goddess
in the woman, burst into tears. She was still
very wroth with Margaret Callaghan, as she
persisted in calling her; very merciless and unforgiving,
as the gentler sex are apt to be—to
the gentler sex. Mr. Bilkins, however, after the
first vexation, missed Margaret from the household;
missed her singing, which was in itself as
helpful as a second girl; missed her hand in the
preparation of those hundred and one nameless
wished in his soul that he had her back again.
Who could make a gruel, when he was ill, or
cook a steak, when he was well, like Margaret?
So, meeting her one morning at the fish-market,
— for Mr. O'Rouke had long since given over
the onerous labor of catching cunners, — he
spoke to her kindly, and asked her how she liked
the change in her life, and if Mr. O'Rouke was
good to her.
“Troth, thin, sur,” said Margaret, with a
short dry laugh, “he's the divil's own!”
Margaret was thin and careworn, and her
laugh had the mild gayety of champagne not
properly corked. These things were apparent
even to Mr. Bilkins, who was not a shrewd observer.
With a duplicity quite foreign to his
nature, he gradually drew from her the true
state of affairs. Mr. O'Rouke was a very bad
case indeed; he did nothing towards her support;
he was almost constantly drunk; the little
money she had laid by was melting away, and
would not last until winter. Mr. O'Rouke was
perpetually coming home with a sprained ankle,
or a bruised shoulder, or a broken head. He
hours, including the cooking-stove. “In short,”
as Mr. Bilkins said in relating the matter afterwards
to Mrs. Bilkins, “he had broken all those
things which he should n't have broken, and
failed to break the one thing he ought to have
broken long ago, — his neck, namely.”
The revelation which startled Mr. Bilkins
most was this: in spite of all, Margaret loved
Larry with the whole of her warm Irish heart.
Further than keeping the poor creature up waiting
for him until ever so much o'clock at night,
it did not appear that he treated her with personal
cruelty. If he had beaten her, she would
have worshipped him; as it was, she merely
loved the ground he trod upon.
Revolving Margaret's troubles in his thoughts
as he walked homeward, Mr. Bilkins struck upon
a plan by which he could help her. When this
plan was laid before Mrs. Bilkins, she opposed it
with a vehemence that convinced him she had
made up her mind to adopt it.
“Never, never will I have that ungrateful
woman under this roof!” cried Mrs. Bilkins;
and accordingly the next day Mr. and Mrs.
mansion, — Margaret as cook, and Larry as
gardener.
“I'm convanient if the owld gintleman is,”
had been Mr. O'Rouke's remark, when the proposition
was submitted to him. Not that Mr.
O'Rouke had the faintest idea of gardening. He
did n't know a tulip from a tomato. He was
one of those sanguine people who never hesitate
to undertake anything, and are never abashed by
their herculean inability.
Mr. Bilkins did not look to Margaret's husband
for any great botanical knowledge; but he
was rather surprised one day when Mr. O'Rouke
pointed to the triangular bed of lilies-of-the-valley,
then out of flower, and remarked, “Thim's
a nate lot o' purtaties ye 've got there, sur.”
Mr. Bilkins, we repeat, did not expect much
from Mr. O'Rouke's skill in gardening; his purpose
was to reform the fellow if possible, and in
any case to make Margaret's lot easier.
Re-established in her old home, Margaret
broke into song again, and Mr. O'Rouke himself
promised to do very well; morally, we mean, not
agriculturally. His ignorance of the simplest
and his dense stupidity on every other subject
were heavy trials to Mr. Bilkins. Happily Mr.
Bilkins was not without a sense of humor, else
he would have found Mr. O'Rouke insupportable.
Just when the old gentleman's patience was
about exhausted, the gardener would commit
some atrocity so perfectly comical that his master
all but loved him for the moment.
“Larry,” said Mr. Bilkins, one breathless afternoon
in the middle of September, “just see
how the thermometer on the back porch stands.”
Mr. O'Rouke disappeared, and after a prolonged
absence returned with the monstrous announcement
that the thermometer stood at 820!
Mr. Bilkins looked at the man closely. He
was unmistakably sober.
“Eight hundred and twenty what?” cried Mr.
Bilkins, feeling very warm, as he naturally would
in so high a temperature.
“Eight hundthred an' twinty degrays, I suppose,
sur.”
“Larry, you're an idiot.”
This was obviously not to Mr. O'Rouke's taste;
for he went out and brought the thermometer,
running parallel with the glass tube, exclaimed,
“Add 'em up yerself, thin!”
Perhaps this would not have been amusing if
Mr. Bilkins had not spent the greater part of the
previous forenoon in initiating Mr. O'Rouke into
the mysteries of the thermometer. Nothing
could make amusing Mr. O'Rouke's method of
setting out crocus bulbs. Mr. Bilkins had received
a lot of a very choice variety from Boston,
and having a headache that morning, turned over
to Mr. O'Rouke the duty of planting them.
Though he had never seen a bulb in his life,
Larry unblushingly asserted that he had set out
thousands for Sir Lucius O'Grady, of O'Grady
Castle, “an illegant place intirely, wid tin miles
o' garden-walks,” added Mr. O'Rouke, crushing
Mr. Bilkins, who boasted only of a few humble
flower-beds.
The following day he stepped into the garden
to see how Larry had done his work. There
stood the parched bulbs, carefully arranged in
circles and squares on top of the soil.
“Did n't I tell you to set out these bulbs?”
cried Mr. Bilkins, wrathfully.
“An' did n't I set 'em out?” expostulated
Mr. O'Rouke. “An' ain't they a settin' there
beautiful?”
“But you should have put them into the
ground, stupid!”
“Is it bury 'em, ye mane? Be jabbers! how
could they iver git out agin? Give the little
jokers a fair show, Misther Bilkins!”
For two weeks Mr. O'Rouke conducted himself
with comparative propriety; that is to say,
he rendered himself useless about the place, appeared
regularly at his meals, and kept sober.
Perhaps the hilarious strains of music which
sometimes issued at midnight from the upper
window of the north gable were not just what
a quiet, unostentatious family would desire; but
on the whole there was not much to complain of.
The third week witnessed a falling off. Though
always promptly on hand at the serving out of
rations, Mr. O'Rouke did not even make a pretence
of working in the garden. He would disappear
mysteriously immediately after breakfast and
reappear with supernatural abruptness at dinner.
Nobody knew what he did with himself in the
interval, until one day he was observed to fall
discovered, he took to the wharves and the alleys
in the distant part of the town. It soon became
evident that his ways were not the ways of temperance,
and that all his paths led to The Wee
Drop.
Of course, Margaret tried to keep this from
the family. Being a woman, she made excuses
for him in her heart. It was a dull life for the
lad anyway, and it was worse than him that was
leading Larry astray. Hours and hours after
the old people had gone to bed, she would sit
without a light in the lonely kitchen, listening
for that shuffling step along the gravel-walk.
Night after night she never closed her eyes, and
went about the house the next day with that
smooth, impenetrable face behind which women
hide their care.
One morning found Margaret sitting pale and
anxious by the kitchen stove. O'Rouke had not
come home at all. Noon came and night, but
not Larry. Whenever Mrs. Bilkins approached
her that day, Margaret was humming “Kate
Kearney” quite merrily. But when her work
was done, she stole out at the back gate and
like a madwoman. O'Rouke had not
been at the Finningans'. He had not been at
The Wee Drop since Monday, and this was
Wednesday night. Her heart sunk within her
when she failed to find him in the police station.
Some dreadful thing had happened to him. She
came back to the house with one hand pressed
wearily against her cheek. The dawn struggled
through the kitchen windows, and fell upon Margaret
crouched by the stove.
She could no longer wear her mask. When
Mr. Bilkins came down she confessed that Larry
had taken to drinking again, and had not been
home for two nights.
“Mayhap he's drownded hisself,” suggested
Margaret, wringing her hands.
“Not he,” said Mr. Bilkins; “he does n't like
the taste of water well enough.”
“Troth, thin, he does n't,” reflected Margaret;
and the reflection comforted her.
“At any rate, I'll go and look him up after
breakfast,” said Mr. Bilkins. And after breakfast,
accordingly, Mr. Bilkins sallied forth with
the depressing expectation of finding Mr. O'Rouke
said the old gentleman to himself, drawing on
his white cotton gloves as he walked up Anchor
Street, “I don't want to find him.”
3. III.
But Mr. O'Rouke was not to be found. With
amiable cynicism Mr. Bilkins directed his steps
in the first instance to the police station, quite
confident that a bird of Mr. O'Rouke's plumage
would be brought to perch in such a cage. But
not so much as a feather of him was discoverable.
The Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian
resort in Rivermouth; there were five
or six other low drinking-shops scattered about
town, and through these Mr. Bilkins went conscientiously.
He then explored various blind
alleys, known haunts of the missing man, and
took a careful survey of the wharves along the
river on his way home. He even shook the apple-tree
near the stable with a vague hope of
bringing down Mr. O'Rouke, but brought down
nothing except a few winter apples, which, being
both unripe and unsound, were not perhaps bad
representatives of the object of his search.
That evening a small boy stopped at the door
identified as Mr. O'Rouke's, which had been
found on Neal's Wharf. This would have told
against another man; but O'Rouke was always
leaving his hat on a wharf. Margaret's distress
is not to be pictured. She fell back upon and
clung to the idea that Larry had drowned himself,
not intentionally, maybe; possibly he had
fallen overboard while intoxicated.
The late Mr. Buckle has informed us that
death by drowning is regulated by laws as inviolable
and beautiful as those of the solar system;
that a certain percentage of the earth's population
is bound to drown itself annually, whether
it wants to or not. It may be presumed, then,
that Rivermouth's proper quota of dead bodies
was washed ashore during the ensuing two
months. There had been gales off the coast and
pleasure parties on the river, and between them
they had managed to do a ghastly business. But
Mr. O'Rouke failed to appear among the flotsam
and jetsam which the receding tides left tangled
in the piles of the Rivermouth wharves. This
convinced Margaret that Larry had proved a too
tempting morsel to some buccaneering shark, or
schools of fish which seem to have a yearly
appointment with the fishermen on this coast.
From that day Margaret never saw a cod or a
mackerel brought into the house without an involuntary
shudder. She averted her head in
making up the fish-balls, as if she half dreaded
to detect a faint aroma of whiskey about them.
And, indeed, why might not a man fall into the
sea, be eaten, say, by a halibut, and reappear on
the scene of his earthly triumphs and defeats in
the non-committal form of hashed fish?
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
't were to consider too curiously to consider
so.
Mr. Bilkins had come to adopt Margaret's explanation
of O'Rouke's disappearance. He was
undoubtedly drowned, had most likely drowned
himself. The hat picked up on the wharf was
strong circumstantial evidence in that direction.
But one feature of the case staggered Mr. Bilkins.
O'Rouke's violin had also disappeared.
Now, it required no great effort to imagine a man
of mania à potu; but it was difficult to conceive
of a man committing violinicide! If the fellow
went to drown himself, why did he take his fiddle
with him? He might as well have taken an
umbrella or a German student-lamp. This question
troubled Mr. Bilkins a good deal first and
last. But one thing was indisputable: the man
was gone,—and had evidently gone by water.
It was now that Margaret invested her husband
with charms of mind and person not calculated
to make him recognizable by any one who
had ever had the privilege of knowing him in the
faulty flesh. She eliminated all his bad qualities,
and projected from her imagination a Mr.
O'Rouke as he ought to have been,—a species
of seraphic being mixed up in some way with a
violin; and to this ideal she erected a headstone
in the suburban cemetery. If Mr. O'Rouke could
have read the inscription, he would never have
suspected his own complicity in the matter.
But there the marble stood, sacred to his
memory; and soon the snow came down from
the gray sky and covered it, and the invisible
snow of weeks and months drifted down on
smoothed off the sharp angles of its grief; and
there was peace upon it.
Not but she sorrowed for Larry at times. But
life had a relish to it again; she was free, though
she did not look at it in that light; she was happier
in a quiet fashion than she had ever been,
though she would not have acknowledged it to
herself. She wondered that she had the heart to
laugh when the ice-man made love to her. Perhaps
she was conscious of something comically
incongruous in the warmth of a gentleman who
spent all winter in cutting ice, and all summer
in dealing it out to his customers. She had not
the same excuse for laughing at the baker; yet
she laughed still more merrily at him when he
pressed her hand over the steaming loaf of brown-bread,
delivered every Saturday morning at the
scullery door. Both these gentlemen had known
Margaret many years, yet neither of them had
valued her very highly until another man came
along and married her. A widow, it would appear,
is esteemed in some sort as a warranted
article, being stamped with the maker's name.
There was even a third lover in prospect; for
was frequently to be seen of a Sunday
afternoon standing in the cemetery and regarding
Mr. O'Rouke's headstone with unrestrained
satisfaction.
A year had passed away, and certain bits of
color blossoming among Margaret's weeds indicated
that the winter of her mourning was
over. The ice-man and the baker were hating
each other cordially, and Mrs. Bilkins was daily
expecting it would be discovered before night
that Margaret had married one or both of them.
But to do Margaret justice, she was faithful in
thought and deed to the memory of O'Rouke,
— not the O'Rouke who disappeared so strangely,
but the O'Rouke who never existed.
“D'ye think, mum,” she said one day to Mrs.
Bilkins, as that lady was adroitly sounding her
on the ice question,—“d'ye think I'd condescind
to take up wid the likes o'him, or the baker
either, afther sich a man as Larry?”
The rectified and clarified O'Rouke was a permanent
wonder to Mr. Bilkins, who bore up
under the bereavement with remarkable resignation.
“Peggy is right,” said the old gentleman,
who was superintending the burning out of the
kitchen flue. “She won't find another man
like Larry O'Rouke, in a hurry.”
“Thrue for ye, Mr. Bilkins,” answered Margaret.
“Maybe there's as good fish in the say
as iver was caught, but I don't belave it all the
same.”
As good fish in the sea! The words recalled
to Margaret the nature of her loss, and she went
on with her work in silence.
“What — what is it, Ezra?” cried Mrs. Bilkins,
changing color, and rising hastily from
the breakfast-table. Her first thought was apoplexy.
There sat Mr. Bilkins, with his wig pushed
back from his forehead, and his eyes fixed vacantly
on The Weekly Chronicle, which he held
out at arm's length before him.
“Good heavens, Ezra! what is the matter?”
Mr. Bilkins turned his eyes upon her mechanically,
as if he were a great wax-doll, and somebody
had pulled his wire.
“Can't you speak, Ezra?”
His lips opened, and moved inarticulately;
then he pointed a rigid finger, in the manner of
a guide-board, at a paragraph in the paper, which
he held up for Mrs. Bilkins to read over his
shoulder. When she had read it she sunk back
into her chair without a word, and the two sat
contemplating each other as if they had never
met before in this world, and were not overpleased
at meeting.
The paragraph which produced this singular
effect on the aged couple occurred at the end of
a column of telegraph despatches giving the details
of an unimportant engagement that had just
taken place between one of the blockading squadron
and a Confederate cruiser. The engagement
itself does not concern us, but this item from the
list of casualties on the Union side has a direct
bearing on our narative: —
“Larry O'Rouke, seaman, splinter wound in
the leg. Not serious.”
That splinter flew far. It glanced from Mr.
O'Rouke's leg, went plumb through the Bilkins
mansion, and knocked over a small marble slab
in the Old South Burying-Ground.
If a ghost had dropped in familiarly to breakfast,
family could not have been greater. How
was the astounding intelligence to be broken to
Margaret? Her explosive Irish nature made the
task one of extreme delicacy. Mrs. Bilkins flatly
declared herself incapable of undertaking it. Mr.
Bilkins, with many misgivings as to his fitness,
assumed the duty; for it would never do to have
the news sprung upon Margaret suddenly by
people outside.
As Mrs. O'Rouke was clearing away the breakfast
things, Mr. Bilkins, who had lingered near
the window with the newspaper in his hand,
coughed once or twice in an unnatural way to
show that he was not embarrassed, and began to
think that maybe it would be best to tell Margaret
after dinner. Mrs. Bilkins fathomed his
thought with that intuition which renders women
terrible, and sent across the room an eye-telegram
to this effect, “Now is your time.”
“There's been another battle down South,
Margaret,” said the old gentleman presently,
folding up the paper and putting it in his pocket.
“A sea-fight this time.”
“Sure, an' they're allus fightin' down there.”
“But not always with so little damage. There
was only one man wounded on our side.”
“Pore man! It's sorry we oughter be for his
wife an' childer, if he's got any.”
“Not badly wounded, you will understand,
Margaret; not at all seriously wounded; only a
splinter in the leg.”
“Faith, thin, a splinter in the leg is no pleasant
thing in itself.”
“A mere scratch,” said Mr. Bilkins lightly, as
if he were constantly in the habit of going about
with a splinter in his own leg, and found it rather
agreeable. “The odd part of the matter is the
man's first name. His first name was Larry.”
Margaret nodded, as one should say, There's
a many Larrys in the world.
“But the oddest part of it,” continued Mr.
Bilkins, in a carelessly sepulchral voice, “is the
man's last name.”
Something in the tone of his voice made Margaret
look at him, and something in the expression
of his face caused the blood to fly from Margaret's
cheek.
“The man's last name,” she repeated, wonderingly.
“Yes, his last name, — O'Rouke.”
“D' ye mane it?” shrieked Margaret, — “d'
ye mane it? Glory to God! O worra! worra!”
“Well, Ezra,” said Mrs. Bilkins, in one of
those spasms of base ingratitude to which even
the most perfect women are liable, “you 've made
nice work of it. You might as well have knocked
her down with an axe!”
“But, my dear — ”
“O bother! — my smelling-bottle, quick! —
second bureau drawer, — left-hand side.”
Joy never kills; it is a celestial kind of hydrogen
of which it seems impossible to get too
much at one inhalation. In an hour Margaret
was able to converse with comparative calmness
on the resuscitation of Larry O'Rouke, whom
the firing of a cannon had brought to the surface
as if he had been in reality a drowned
body.
Now that the whole town was aware of Mr.
O'Rouke's fate, his friend Mr. Donnehugh came
forward with a statement that would have been
of some interest at an earlier period, but was of
no service as matters stood, except so far as it
assisted in removing from Mr. Bilkins's mind a
of the telegraphic reports was Margaret's scapegrace
of a husband. Mr. Donnehugh had known
all along that O'Rouke had absconded to Boston
by a night train and enlisted in the navy. It
was the possession of this knowledge that had
made it impossible for Mr. Donnehugh to look at
Mr. O'Rouke's gravestone without grinning.
At Margaret's request, and in Margaret's
name, Mr. Bilkins wrote three or four letters to
O'Rouke, and finally succeeded in extorting an
epistle from that gentleman, in which he told
Margaret to cheer up, that his fortune was as
good as made, and that the day would come
when she should ride through the town in her
own coach, and no thanks to old flint-head, who
pretended to be so fond of her. Mr. Bilkins tried
to conjecture who was meant by old flint-head,
but was obliged to give it up. Mr. O'Rouke
furthermore informed Margaret that he had three
hundred dollars prize-money coming to him, and
broadly intimated that when he got home he
intended to have one of the most extensive blowouts
ever witnessed in Rivermouth.
“Oche!” laughed Margaret, “that's jist Larry
nonsense an' spirits.”
“That he was,” said Mr. Bilkins, dryly.
Content with the fact that her husband was in
the land of the living, Margaret gave herself
no trouble over the separation. O'Rouke had
shipped for three years; one third of his term of
service was past, and two years more, God willing,
would see him home again. This was Margaret's
view of it. Mr. Bilkins's view of it was
not so cheerful. The prospect of Mr. O'Rouke's
ultimate return was anything but enchanting.
Mr. Bilkins was by no means disposed to kill the
fatted calf. He would much rather have killed
the Prodigal Son. However, there was always
this chance: he might never come back.
The tides rose and fell at the Rivermouth
wharves; the summer moonlight and the winter
snow, in turn, bleached its quiet streets; and
the two years had nearly gone by. In the
mean time nothing had been heard of O'Rouke.
If he ever received the five or six letters sent
to him, he did not fatigue himself by answering
them.
“Larry 's all right,” said hopeful Margaret.
have knowed it. It's the bad news that travels
fast.”
Mr. Bilkins was not so positive about that. It
had taken a whole year to find out that O'Rouke
had not drowned himself.
The period of Mr. O'Rouke's enlistment had
come to an end. Two months slipped by, and
he had neglected to brighten Rivermouth with
his presence. There were many things that
might have detained him, difficulties in getting
his prize-papers or in drawing his pay; but there
was no reason why he might not have written.
The days were beginning to grow long to Margaret,
and vague forebodings of misfortune possessed
her.
Perhaps we had better look up Mr. O'Rouke.
He had seen some rough times, during those
three years, and some harder work than catching
cunners at the foot of Anchor Street, or setting
out crocuses in Mr. Bilkins's back garden. He
had seen battles and shipwreck, and death in
many guises; but they had taught him nothing,
as the sequel will show. With his active career
in the navy we shall not trouble ourselves; we
of his term of service.
Several months before, he had been transferred
from the blockading squadron to a gun-boat attached
to the fleet operating against the forts defending
New Orleans. The forts had fallen, the
fleet had passed on to the city, and Mr. O'Rouke's
ship lay off in the stream, binding up her wounds.
In three days he would receive his discharge, and
the papers entitling him to a handsome amount
of prize-money in addition to his pay. With
noble contempt for so much good fortune, Mr.
O'Rouke dropped over the bows of the gun-boat
one evening and managed to reach the levee.
In the city he fell in with some soldiers, and,
being of a convivial nature, caroused with them
that night, and next day enlisted in a cavalry
regiment.
Desertion in the face of the enemy — for
though the city lay under Federal guns, it was
still hostile enough — involved the heaviest penalties.
O'Rouke was speedily arrested with other
deserters, tried by court-martial, and sentenced
to death.
The intelligence burst like a shell upon the
for the sound of Larry O'Rouke's footstep on the
threshold. It was a heavy load for Margaret to
bear, after all those years of patient vigil. But
the load was to be lightened for her. In consideration
of O'Rouke's long service, and in view
of the fact that his desertion so near the expiration
of his time was an absurdity, the Good President
commuted his sentence to imprisonment
for life, with loss of prize-money and back pay.
Mr. O'Rouke was despatched North, and placed
in Moyamensing Prison.
If joy could kill, Margaret would have been a
dead woman the day these tidings reached Rivermonth;
and Mr. Bilkins himself would have been
in a critical condition, for, though he did not
want O'Rouke shot or hanged, he was delighted
to have him permanently shelved.
After the excitement was over, and this is
always the trying time, Margaret accepted the
situation philosophically.
“The pore lad's out o' harum's rache, any
way,” she reflected. “He can't be gittin' into
hot wather now, and that's a fact. And maybe
after awhiles they'll let him go agin. They
Larry's done no hurt to nobody but hisself.”
Margaret was inclined to be rather severe on
President Lincoln for taking away Larry's prize-money.
The impression was strong on her
mind that the money went into Mr. Lincoln's
private exchequer.
“I would n't wonder if Misthress Lincoln had
a new silk gownd or two this fall,” Margaret
would remark, sarcastically.
The prison rules permitted Mr. O'Rouke to receive
periodical communications from his friends
outside. Once every quarter Mr. Bilkins wrote
him a letter, and in the interim Margaret kept
him supplied with those doleful popular ballads,
printed on broadsides, which one sees pinned up
for sale on the iron railings of city churchyards,
and seldom anywhere else. They seem the natural
exhalations of the mould and pathos of
such places, but we have a suspicion that they
are written by sentimental young undertakers.
Though these songs must have been a solace to
Mr. O'Rouke in his captivity, he never so far
forgot himself as to acknowledge their receipt.
It was only through the kindly chaplain of the
of the well-being of her husband.
Towards the close of that year the great
O'Rouke himself did condescend to write one
letter. As this letter has never been printed,
and as it is the only specimen extant of Mr.
O'Rouke's epistolary manner, we lay it before
the reader verbatim et literatim:—
febuary. 1864
mi belovid wife
fur the luv of God sind mee pop gose
the wezel. yours till deth
larry O rouke
“Pop goes the Weasel” was sent to him, and
Mr. Bilkins ingeniously slipped into the same
envelope “Beware of the Bowl,” and “The
Drunkard's Death,” two spirited compositions
well calculated to exert a salutary influence over
a man imprisoned for life.
There is nothing in this earthly existence so
uncertain as what seems to be a certainty. To
all appearances, the world outside of Moyamensing
Prison was forever a closed book to O'Rouke.
But the Southern Confederacy collapsed, the General
Amnesty Proclamation was issued, cell doors
were thrown open; and one afternoon Mr. Larry
into the Bilkins kitchen and frightened Margaret
nearly out of her skin.
Mr. O'Rouke's summing up of his case was
characteristic: “I've bin kilt in battle, hanged
by the coort-martial, put into the lock-up for life,
and here I am, bedad, not a ha'p'orth the worse
for it.”
None the worse for it, certainly, and none the
better. By no stretch of magical fiction can we
make an angel of him. He is not at all the
material for an apotheosis. It was not for him
to reform and settle down, and become a respectable,
oppressed tax-payer. His conduct in Rivermouth,
after his return, was a repetition of his
old ways. Margaret all but broke down under
the tests to which he put her affections, and
came at last to wish that Larry had never got
out of Moyamensing Prison.
If any change had taken place in Mr. O'Rouke,
it showed itself in occasional fits of sullenness
towards Margaret. It was in one of these moods
that he slouched his hat over his brows, and told
her she need n't wait dinner for him.
It will be a cold dinner, if Margaret has kept
day, and O'Rouke has not come home.
Possibly he is off on a whaling voyage; possibly
the swift maelstrom has dragged him down;
perhaps he is lifting his hand to knock at the
door of the Bilkins mansion as we pen these
words. But Margaret does not watch for him
impatiently any more. There are strands of gray
in her black hair. She has had her romance.
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