"A week went by, and in the presence of a minister of God I swore to a lie. Richard West swore to another, for he was no more capable of love than of honor. Then followed what, woman though you already are, I cannot tell you of—prostitution, outrage, that left me a poor dishonored thing—my womanhood a curse, and the creeping horror of physical repugnance to a loathsome touch my bridal portion! God forgive those who forced me to this! God forgive them!—I do not know that I ever can! Ten years afterwards I saw one happy day—the first since my engagement. It was when Richard West was shot down in a gambling-house by one of his victims, and brought home dead!

"Now, Emily, you know, better than any other living, the heart of the woman who is supposed to be so calm and placid! Now you can have some idea what I have suffered to-night, when I saw the same pit opening for you? Do you understand me? Have I said enough?"

"Enough, dear, dear Aunt, but not one word too much! I understand you, I know you, now! Oh, save me, save me at any sacrifice from this marriage!" And the young girl was sobbing in the arms of Aunt Martha, who now that her story was told grew her gentle self again, and smoothed down the brown hair with a promise of aid and sympathy which was not likely to be forfeited.



CHAPTER IV.

ANOTHER ADVENTURE OF THE TWO FRIENDS—THE LIGHT IN THE WINDOW—A SINGULAR SPOT ON THE WALL—A CLIMB, A TUMBLE AND A PURSUIT—HOW IT ALL ENDED FOR THE TIME.

We left Walter Harding and Tom Leslie, at the conclusion of a former chapter, coming out from the lodgings of the latter, on Bleecker Street near Elm, Leslie accompanying Harding out to a car on the Bowery before betaking himself to bed. "Man proposes but God disposes," says the French proverb: There is "a divinity that shapes our ends," even in the matters of going to bed and getting into railroad cars. It was somewhat longer than either had expected, before he reached the "desired haven" of home and a bed-chamber.

It was past midnight when the two friends reached the Bowery, and the Third Avenue cars, on one of which Harding was going up, were running less frequently than early in the evening. There was not one of the green lights in sight down the Bowery from the corner of Bleecker Street, and the friends chatted a moment while waiting for one to make its appearance. Then they grew tired and restless, as people very soon do who are waiting for cars (or boiling tea-kettles, or marriage-days, or any thing of that kind); and they walked down to the corner of Prince to meet the tardy conveyance. There was a green light coming up, some blocks down the Bowery, but it seemed to the two sleepy fellows as if it would never reach the corner. They walked listlessly a block or two down Prince Street toward Broadway, still arm in arm as they had left the house on Bleecker. They wheeled to walk back. Suddenly the eyes of Harding were attracted by the very bright light in one of the upper windows of an old brick house on Prince Street, large and stately and giving evidence of having once been the residence of some person of fortune, though now a little dilapidated.

"People in that house must have an interest in one of the Gas Companies," said Harding, "by the quantity of light they show at this time of night! Why, the window is all ablaze!"

Tom Leslie looked up, as his friend spoke. They were on the opposite side of the street from the house in question, and consequently had a fair view of the lighted window. It was very light indeed, a perfect flood of gas-light pouring on a white curtain that partially covered the whole sash. Partially, not altogether. Whether accidentally or by intention, it was swept away at the lower right-hand corner, leaving a little of the top of the white wall of the room visible, with the edge of the ceiling. Was there ever a man (or woman) who did not look in through a half-closed curtain, precisely because there is no propriety whatever in doing so? Willis has made some of his most taking verbal photographs, during his "lookings on at the war" at Washington, from the glimpses caught of the lower half lengths of notables, more or less undressed, through windows supposed to be closed against outside observation.

Both Walter Harding and Tom Leslie took an eager look up at the white wall and the edge of the ceiling, in the upper chamber of the house on Prince Street. Harding either had sharper eyes than Leslie, or stood in a more favorable position, for he saw what Leslie did not, and his discovery was communicated in the brief exclamation:

"By Jupiter!"

"What?" asked Leslie.

"Look!" said Harding, drawing his friend's head into position for a better view. "If that is not a secesh flag draped up near the ceiling, may I never brag of my eyesight again!"

Tom Leslie took a nearer look. "If it is not a secesh flag," he said, "draped over some kind of a gilded ornament like a star, may I never find another opportunity to look at a pretty girl through this double-barrelled telescope."

And with the word he had whipped out an opera-glass from his pocket, large enough to have been formed out of two moderate-sized specimens of the optical instrument he had named, and levelled it at the object on the wall. His observations and those of Harding through the same powerful instrument resulted in the same conclusion. The two red bars and one white one of the Confederate flag, with the blue field in the corner and meagre number of stars, were all plainly visible, and beneath the flag was a gilded circle, some four or five inches in diameter, with a radiating centre.

"A nice house that, I don't think!" was Tom Leslie's not very classical comment, as he took the double-barrelled telescope finally down from his eye, after a second inspection. (It may be mentioned, in a parenthesis, that the Third Avenue car had some time since rumbled by, and that the very existence of that entire line of communication had been forgotten by the two friends.) "Where is Provost Marshal Kennedy, I wonder?"

"Oh, it may not be quite so bad as you think," said Harding, reading the whole of his friend's thought. "Who knows?—that secesh flag may be a trophy won by one of our soldiers, and brought or sent home."

"Humph!" said Tom, significantly. "That won't do, Harding! If the flag was a trophy, and in the house of a loyal man, it would not be quite so neatly draped on the wall, with the lodge emblem of the Knights of the Golden Circle under it!"

"Phew!" said Harding, "is that really the emblem?"

"The emblem, and nothing else," answered Leslie. "There is mischief in that house, and the nest must be looked after."

Suddenly, and while the two friends yet looked, there were dark shadows flung on the white curtain, as if of moving figures, and then one shadow, as if of a human arm, began to move up and down on the curtain and kept moving steadily. Directly there was one quick sharp scream, followed by no other sound, though both listened intently. Then a figure came to the window, and apparently looked out, disappearing again in a moment and leaving every thing as before.

"By George, I cannot stand this!" said Leslie.

"Nor I," said Harding, moved by quite a different feeling. "I am getting sleepy and must go home."

"Must you?" said Tom Leslie. "Well, you are not going a step. You cannot be spared just yet. Do you see that tree?"

Harding had seen the tree for some minutes—a tall one with wide branches, standing a little to the left of the window. But he did not see anything special in the tree, while Leslie did, and that made the great difference.

"I am going on a perilous expedition," continued Leslie, in a bantering tone, but his voice sinking lower, almost without his being aware of the fact, and jerking off his boots meanwhile on the sidewalk. "If I never come back, comfort my bereaved wife and children. If I break my neck, see me comfortably buried, without a coroner's inquest if possible."

"What are you going to do?" asked Harding, with a faint premonition, however, of his intention.

"I am going to get a peep in at that window," was the reply, "or I am going to break the most precious neck in America in making the attempt. I used to be able to climb, though some years ago. Keep still, here goes!"

There seemed to be at the moment no passers in the street, and Harding's anxious gaze around showed no policeman in the vicinity. By the time he had fairly spoken the last words, Leslie had thrown off his broad hat, crossed the street, and commenced climbing the tree. Harding followed and stood under the tree, as if Leslie was going to throw down apples and he must catch them. Leslie was a little awkward, but hugged the bark handsomely, and was soon on a level with the window. Harding saw him distinctly, by the reflected light from the window, clutch his arm around one of the main limbs, and throw his head and body forward so that his face was not more than a foot from the window. He had not looked in more than a moment, when Harding heard him utter a quick, short cry, and the next instant he seemed to be trying to regain his hold of the tree. Then there was a rush, a tumble, and he seemed to be falling. Harding threw himself beneath him, and Leslie half slid and half fell to the pavement, with such violence as to send both sprawling into the middle of the street. Harding was not much hurt; Leslie seemed to be injured, and limped a little as he sprang up.

"Are you hurt, Tom? What made you fall?" was the double question that Harding attempted to ask.

"My God! can that be possible?" was the inconsequent answer, and his hand went up to his head as if the organs of thought were for the moment disordered.

"What do you mean? What did you see, Tom?" was Harding's next double question. Leslie was pulling on his boots.

"See? Nothing—every thing! I will tell you all about it when my brains get settled!" was the reply. "I have simply been frightened out of my boots—no, I left my boots down here. But I was frightened out of the tree, and came devilish near to killing myself and you. Eh, didn't I?"

"Never mind about that! Tell us what you saw?" said Harding, whose bump of curiosity now began to be seriously agitated.

"The red woman! witch! devil! What does it all mean?" was the torrent of incoherence which next burst from Leslie, not affording Harding a very close solution of the mystery, but promising at least something.

"Well?" said the latter, expecting more. They had again crossed the street, and stood opposite the house of mystery. Leslie was endeavoring to brush his soiled clothes with that most difficult of all brushes, the hand. Harding was looking full at the window, and waiting for the further explanation. Suddenly, a carriage whirled through Prince from the direction of Broadway, and pulled up immediately before the house. Leslie stopped brushing his clothes. At the same moment, a head was again thrust against the window, and immediately withdrawn. Then the light against the curtain dimmed suddenly. Leslie "put that and that together" with the celerity of a lawyer and the confidence of a man of the world. The people in that house were going away. Where? That was something to be looked into.

"You know where the livery stable round the corner is, on Houston?" he asked hurriedly of Harding.

"Yes," was the reply.

"I am too lame to run fast," said Leslie, speaking very rapidly. "We must follow those people, if they go to perdition. Go to the stable, quick—do. There is always at least one carriage standing ready, and have it here as soon as money can bring it. I will watch meanwhile. Hurry! hurry!"

Probably Harding, who was rather precise in his ordinary movements, had not gone so fast in ten years. He was around the corner before the last words had fairly left Leslie's mouth—going as if an enraged woman and three lively policemen had been close after him. Leslie stepped across the street again, took a glance at the number on the lamps of the hack as he passed, and then ensconced himself in a deserted doorway very near, to watch what followed. Every moment that Harding was gone seemed an hour. Would they come out and get away, after all, before the coming of the other vehicle? What kept him so long? (He had been gone about half a minute!) Had there been, for once, no carriage in waiting at the livery? or had Harding concluded to go to sleep on the road? And what the deuce did it all mean—the half-dozen persons, and one a woman almost completely stripped, whom he had seen in that moment's glance into that upper chamber? And the red woman!—aye, the red woman!—that bothered Tom Leslie the worst, and as he had himself confessed, frightened him.

At this juncture the door of the house opened, and a man and two women came out. The man, from his stature and general appearance, and especially from his hat, struck Tom as strangely like the tall Virginian whom they had seen two hours before on Broadway. One of the women might be the girl, Kate; and the third—Leslie indulged in another bit of a shudder as he thought that possibly the third might be the red woman. They were all muffled up, however, and Leslie dared not quit his shelter to observe them more nearly. The driver kept his seat on the box. The man opened the door of the carriage, all stepped in, and the carriage whirled away out into the Bowery and up town. There they were, going, gone, and Harding not yet returned with the means of pursuit! Confusion, vexation and every cross-grained word in the language! So thought Leslie, as he dodged out to the Bowery and watched the disappearing carriage. It had not turned off into any one of the cross-streets, and seemed making for one or the other of the forks of the avenues at the Cooper Institute. Half a minute more, however, and it might as well be the proverbial "needle in the hay-stack" for any chance they would have of finding it again.

Hark! yes, there came tearing hoofs round into Prince Street from Crosby, and the lamps of a carriage shivered with the speed at which they were going. The horses were on the run. It was their carriage after all, for nobody else could be in such a hurry. Twenty seconds brought the flying carriage to the corner—a second's pause—a hail from each of the friends—and Leslie was inside with Harding, and the carriage was dashing up the Bowery about as fast as two good horses could run, with Leslie and Harding each peering out of the opened windows at the side, to see if they could catch any glimpse of a carriage ahead.

There is no doubt that the horses attached to the hinder carriage, whatever may have been the opinions of those attached to the one before,—thought that the rate of speed was a little rapid for a hot midnight in June; and certainly one or two pedestrians who came near being run over at the crossings just below the Cooper Institute, had an impression that some rebel prisoner must be running away from Fort Lafayette or some government official trying to stop one. As Harding and Leslie neared that highly respectable but very ugly monument to the profits of iron and glue and the public pride of Mr. Peter Cooper,—of course there arose a question, the carriage being out of sight, which of the two branches it had taken. The Third Avenue being the plainer road, Leslie decided for the Fourth, and with a shout to the driver just before they reached Tompkins Market, the horses' heads were turned in that direction, and away they went up the comparatively quiet avenue.

At the rate they were going they soon overtook a carriage, as they would have overtaken any thing less rapid than a locomotive or a whirlwind. It was lucky that Leslie had taken the precaution to note the number on the hack, as otherwise they would have been at fault after all. As they dashed by the carriage, which was going at good speed, that cosmopolitan saw that the number on the lamps was a wrong one; and so they kept on. Another carriage was passed at the same speed, their horses by this time dripping as if they had been plunged into the river, but the driver of hack No. 2980 going ahead under the influence of a private five dollars and the promise of an extraordinary glass of brandy. At Twenty-eighth Street they jerked the check-string and the driver pulled up. There was nothing in sight, short of the railroad tunnel.

"We have lost them!" said Harding, whose organ of hopefulness was not so large as that of his friend.

"Humph! maybe so!" was Leslie's reply, his eyes peering out of the windows on all sides, meanwhile. "One thing is certain, that I am not going to bed until I find that hack and know where it has been to-night!"

At that moment, with better fortune than two such wild-goose chasers deserved, they saw the lamps of a carriage flash across Twenty-eighth Street, going up Lexington Avenue.

"By George! there they are!" said the sanguine Leslie.

"Maybe so!" was the reply of Harding, echoing the words his friend had used the moment before.

A word from Leslie to the driver, and away went the carriage down Twenty-eighth Street toward Lexington Avenue. On the avenue there was a carriage ahead, driving at good speed but not at such a headlong rate as their own had been pursuing. Leslie pulled the check-string. "Pass that carriage!" he said to the driver, and the horses sprung out at full speed again. The speed of the carriage ahead did not increase: whoever occupied it probably had no idea of being pursued. Before it had gone two blocks further the pursuers had passed it, and Tom Leslie brought his hand down upon Harding's leg with a force that made him wince, as he saw the number on the near lamp.

"Got them, by the tail of the holy camel!"

It was indeed the same carriage that had left Prince Street less than a quarter of an hour before. They were now ahead of it, and it would not answer either to slacken speed so perceptibly as to let it pass, or to turn back to meet it. Either course might excite apprehension, if there was really anything worth watching in the adventure. A word more to the driver arranged all. They wheeled down Thirty-fourth Street to Third Avenue, drove rapidly around the two blocks to Thirty-sixth, and came out again on Lexington, with the carriage just ahead of them and a fine opportunity to dog it at leisure.

Two or three minutes afterwards the leading carriage wheeled out of Lexington Avenue into East 5— Street, not very far from the Eastern Dispensary, which has lately so well supplied the place of a soldiers' hospital. It was driving slowly, now, and unless some peculiar dodge was intended, Leslie knew that the occupants must be near their destination. To follow them further with the carriage would be both useless and dangerous. Stopping the carriage and telling the driver to wait for them in the avenue half a dozen blocks above, the two friends alighted and followed their quarry on foot. They were close behind the carriage, now, but keeping the sidewalk, and even if observed they might have been supposed to be a couple of late wayfarers plodding home, and not spies as they at that moment felt themselves to be, in however meritorious a cause! About half way between Fourth Avenue and Madison, the carriage stopped before a handsome brown-stone house. "Nothing venture nothing have!" is an old motto that never wears out. Before the rumble of the carriage had fairly stopped or the driver could have had time to turn around, the two friends were over the area railings and under the steps. Not a dignified position, perhaps, nor a pleasant one in which to be caught in the event of a sudden opening of the area door; but other men have risked as much for a much idler curiosity!

Perfect silence under the steps, except two loudly-beating hearts and a little quick breathing. Leslie ventured a look around the corner of the stoop—saw the driver get down and open the door, and the one man and two women alight and go up the steps. For the rest, they were obliged to depend upon the ears. One of the women spoke:

"It will come to-morrow at midnight?"

Harding could feel that Leslie shuddered, and could distinguish his sharp whisper to himself:

"The red woman's voice! I knew I could not be mistaken!"

Then the voice of the man said: "Wait a moment!" and Leslie fancied that he recognized that voice quite as well as the other. Then there was a quick pull of the bell, the sound tinkling far back in the still house. Then came two sharp pulls after the pause of a moment, and then a fourth after another pause. Not until the fourth tinkle had been heard was there any other sound within the house. Then a door was heard to open and shut, and feet were heard in the hall. The man's voice said "All right!" and the carriage drove away. An inner door opened, but the outer one (as the friends could easily distinguish by the sound of the voices) remained closed until some one within asked:

"How many?"

"Seven!" answered the man's voice. Then the outer door opened, all went in, the doors closed and were locked, the footsteps in the hall died away, and the friends heard no more.

Very gingerly, as if some depredation on personal property had lately been committed, the two volunteer midnight guardians of the public weal climbed again over the area railings, after all had been still for a moment. Not a word passed between them. Harding stepped softly up the stone steps to the door and noted the number on it, then down again, as if he was treading on eggs. Leslie counted the number of houses from the corner, with steps not more sonorous, and looked around to see whether they could possibly not have been watched by a policeman, when getting into and out of the area, because they did not intend to steal. All these things accomplished, and apparently nothing more to be done, they went quietly down 5— Street to Lexington Avenue and sought their carriage.



CHAPTER V.

THE MYSTERY OF THE RED WOMAN—ANOTHER OF TOM LESLIE'S LONG STORIES—AN INCIDENT OF PARIS IN 1860—THE VISION OFMTHE WHITE MIST—TWO MEN WITH ONE WONDER AND ONE PURPOSE.

"And who was the red woman?"

It has been indicated in a former chapter that both Tom Leslie and Walter Lane Harding intended, at one period of the night, to go to bed as soon as possible. The event was that neither found that luxury until the milkman was bawling under the windows. Harding had contrived to raise a large amount of curiosity, especially about the "red woman" and her possible connection with the events of the evening, and Leslie tired and satisfied him, collectively and at intervals, with another long story before they separated. Only in his own words can that story be so conveyed as to be intelligible.

"I had returned from Vienna to Paris," he said, "late in 1860. No matter what I was doing in Paris; and as we are upon a serious subject, don't let me hear a word about 'grisettes' or the 'back room of a baker's shop.' I lodged in the little Rue Marie Stuart, not far from the Rue Montorgeuil, and only two or three minutes' walk from the Louvre, for the long picture galleries of which I had an unfortunate weakness. I had a tradesman with a pretty wife for my landlord, and a cozy little room in which three persons could sit down comfortably, for my domicil. As I did not often have more than two visitors, my room was quite sufficient; and as I spent a large proportion of my evenings at other places than my lodgings, the space was three quarters of the time more than I needed.

"One of my intimates, a young Prussian by the name of Adolph Von Berg, had a habit of visiting mediums, clairvoyants, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, fortune-tellers. Though I had been in company with clairvoyants in many instances, I had never, before my return to Paris in the late summer of 1860, entered any one of those places in which professional fortune-tellers carried on their business. It was early in September, I think, that at the earnest solicitation of Von Berg, who had been reading and smoking with me at my lodgings, I went with him, late in the evening, to a small two-story house in the Rue La Reynie Ogniard, a little street down the Rue Saint Denis toward the quays of the Seine, and running from Saint Denis across to the Rue Saint Martin. The house seemed to me to be one of the oldest in Paris, although built of wood; and the wrinkled and crazy appearance of the front was eminently suggestive of the face of an old woman on which time had long been plowing furrows to plant disease. The interior of the house, when we entered it by the dingy and narrow hall-way, that night, well corresponded with the exterior. A tallow candle in a tin sconce was burning on the wall, half hiding and half revealing the grime on the plastering, the cobwebs in the corners, and the rickety stairs by which it might be supposed that the occupants ascended to the second story.

"My companion tinkled a small bell that lay upon a little uncovered table in the hall (the outer door having been entirely unfastened, to all appearance), and a slattern girl came out from an inner room. On recognizing my companion, who had visited the house before, she led the way, without a word, to the same room she had herself just quitted. There was nothing remarkable in this. A shabby table, and two or three still more shabby chairs, occupied the room, and a dark wax-taper stood on the table, while at the side opposite the single window a curtain of some dark stuff shut in almost one entire side of the apartment. We took seats on the rickety chairs, and waited in silence, Adolph informing me that the etiquette (strange name for such a place) of the house did not allow of conversation, not with the proprietors, carried on in that apartment sacred to the divine mysteries.

"Perhaps fifteen minutes had elapsed, and I had grown fearfully tired of waiting, when the corner of the curtain was suddenly thrown back, and the figure of a woman stood in the space thus created. Every thing behind her seemed to be in darkness; but some description of bright light, which did not show through the curtain at all, and which seemed almost dazzling enough to be Calcium or Drummond, shed its rays directly upon her side-face, throwing every feature, from brow to chin, into bold relief, and making every fold of her dark dress visible. But I scarcely saw the dress, the face being so remarkable beyond any thing I had ever witnessed. I had looked to see an old, wrinkled hag—it being the general understanding that all witches and fortune-tellers must be long past the noon of life; but instead, I saw a woman who could not have been over thirty-five or forty, with a figure of regal magnificence, and a face that would have been, but for one circumstance, beautiful beyond description. Apelles never drew and Phidias never chiselled nose or brow of more classic perfection, and I have never seen the bow of Cupid in the mouth of any woman more ravishingly shown than in that feature of the countenance of the sorceress.

"I said that but for one circumstance that face would have been beautiful beyond description. And yet no human eye ever looked upon a face more hideously fearful than it was in reality. Even a momentary glance could not be cast upon it without a shudder, and a longer gaze involved a species of horrible fascination which affected one like a nightmare. You do not understand yet what was this remarkable and most hideous feature. I can scarcely find words to describe it to you so that you can catch the full force of the idea—I must try, however. You have often seen Mephistopheles in his flame-colored dress, and caught some kind of impression that the face was of the same hue, though the fact was that it was of the natural color and only affected by the lurid character of the dress and by the Satanic pencilling of the eyebrows! Well, this face was really what that seemed for the moment to be. It was redder than blood—red as fire, and yet so strangely did the flame-color play through it that you knew no paint laid upon the skin could have produced the effect. It almost seemed that the skin and the whole mass of flesh were transparent, and that the red color came from some kind of fire or light within, as the red bottle in a druggist's window might glow when you were standing full in front of it and the gas was turned on to full height behind. Every feature—brow, nose, lips, chin, even the eyes themselves, and their very pupils, seemed to be pervaded and permeated by this lurid flame; and it was impossible for the beholder to avoid asking himself whether there were indeed spirits of flame—salamandrines—who sometimes existed out of their own element and lived and moved as mortals.

"Have I given you a strange and fearful picture? Be sure that I have not conveyed to you one thousandth part of the impression made upon myself, and that until the day I die that strange apparition will remain stamped upon the tablets of my mind. Diabolical beauty! infernal ugliness!—I would give half my life, be it longer or shorter, to be able to explain whence such things can come, to confound and stupefy all human calculation!

"Well, as I was saying, there stood my horribly beautiful fiend, and there I sat spell-bound before her. As for Adolph, though he had told me nothing in advance of the peculiarities of her appearance, he had been fully aware of them, of course, and I had the horrible surprise all to myself. I think the sorceress saw the mingled feeling in my face, and that a smile blended of pride and contempt contorted the proud features and made the ghastly face yet more ghastly for one moment. If so, the expression soon passed away, and she stood, as before, the incarnation of all that was terrible and mysterious. At length, still retaining her place and fixing her eyes upon Von Berg, she spoke, sharply, brusquely, and decidedly:

"'You are here again! what do you want?'

"'I come to introduce my friend, the Baron Charles Denmore, of England,' answered Von Berg, 'who wishes—'

"'Nothing!' said the sorceress, the word coming from her lips with an unmistakably hissing sound. 'He wants nothing, and he is not the Baron Charles Denmore! He comes from far away, across the sea, and he would not have come here to-night but that you insisted upon it! Take him away—go away yourself—and never let me see you again unless you have something to ask or you wish me to do you an injury!'

"'But—' began Von Berg.

"'Not another word!' said the sorceress, 'I have said. Go, before you repent having come at all!'

"'Madame,' I began to say, awed out of the feeling at least of equality which I should have felt to be proper under such circumstances, and only aware that Adolph, and possibly myself, had incurred the enmity of a being so near to the supernatural as to be at least dangerous—'Madame, I hope that you will not think—'

"But here she cut me short, as she had done Von Berg the instant before.

"'Hope nothing, young man!' she said, her voice perceptibly less harsh and brusque than it had been when speaking to my companion. 'Hope nothing and ask nothing until you may have occasion; then come to me.'

"'And then?'

"'Then I will answer every question you may think proper to put to me. Stay! you may have occasion to visit me sooner than you suppose, or I may have occasion to force knowledge upon you that you will not have the boldness to seek. If so, I shall send for you. Now go, both of you!'

"The dark curtain suddenly fell, and the singular vision faded with the reflected light which had filled the room. The moment after, I heard the shuffling feet of the slattern girl coming to show us out of the room, but, singularly enough, as you will think, not out of the house! Without a word we followed her—Adolph, who knew the customs of the place, merely slipping a twenty-franc piece into her hand; and in a moment more we were out in the street and walking up the Rue Saint Denis. It is not worth while to detail the conversation which followed between us as we passed up to the Rue Marie Stuart, I to my lodgings and Adolph to his own, further on, close to the Rue Vivienne and not far from the Boulevard Montmartre. Of course I asked him fifty questions, the replies to which left me quite as much in the dark as before. He knew, he said, and hundreds of other persons in Paris knew, the singularity of the personal appearance of the sorceress, and her apparent power of divination, but neither he nor they had any knowledge of her origin. He had been introduced at her house several months before, and had asked questions affecting his family in Prussia and the chances of descent of certain property, the replies to which had astounded him. He had heard of her using marvellous and fearful incantations, but had never himself witnessed any thing of them. In two or three instances, before the present, he had taken friends to the house and introduced them under any name which he chose to apply to them for the time, and the sorceress had never before chosen to call him to account for the deception, though, according to the assurances of his friends after leaving the house, she had never failed to arrive at the truth of their nationalities and positions in life. There must have been something in myself or my circumstances, he averred, which had produced so singular an effect upon the witch, (as he evidently believed her to be,) and he had the impression that at no distant day I should again hear from her. That was all, and so we parted, I in any other condition of mind than that promising sleep, and really without closing my eyes, except for a moment or two at a time, during the night which followed. When I did attempt to force myself into slumber, a red spectre stood continually before me, an unearthly light seemed to sear my covered eyeballs, and I awoke with a start. Days passed before I sufficiently wore away the impression to be comfortable, and at least two or three weeks before my rest became again entirely unbroken.

"You must be partially aware with what anxiety we Americans temporarily sojourning on the other side of the Atlantic, who loved the country we had left behind on this, watched the succession of events which preceded and accompanied the Presidential election of that year. Some suppose that a man loses his love for his native land, or finds it comparatively chilled within his bosom, after long residence abroad. The very opposite is the case, I think! I never knew what the old flag was, until I saw it waving from the top of an American consulate abroad, or floating from the gaff of one of our war-vessels, when I came down the mountains to some port on the Mediterranean. It had been merely red, white and blue bunting, at home, where the symbols of our national greatness were to be seen on every hand: it was the only symbol of our national greatness when we were looking at it from beyond the sea; and the man whose eyes will not fill with tears and whose throat will not choke a little with overpowering feeling, when catching sight of the Stars and Stripes where they only can be seen to remind him of the glory of the country of which he is a part, is unworthy the name of patriot or of man!

"But to return: Where was I? Oh! I was remarking with what interest we on the other side of the water watched the course of affairs at home, during that year when the rumble of distant thunder was just heralding the storm. You are well aware that without extensive and long-continued connivance on the part of sympathizers among the leading people of Europe—England and France especially—secession could never have been accomplished so far as it has been; and there never could have been any hope of its eventual success if there had been no hope of one or both these two countries bearing it up on their strong and unscrupulous arms. The leaven of foreign aid to rebellion was working even then, both in London and Paris; and perhaps we had opportunities over the water for a nearer guess at the peril of the nation, than you could have had in the midst of your party-political squabbles at home.

"During the months of September and October, when your Wide-Awakes on the one hand, and your conservative Democracy on the other, were parading the streets with banners and music, as they or their predecessors had done in so many previous contests, and believing that nothing worse could be involved than a possible party defeat and some bad feelings, we, who lived where revolutions were common, thought that we discovered the smouldering spark which would be blown to revolution here. The disruption of the Charleston Convention and through it of the Democracy; the bold language and firm attitude of the Republicans; the well-understood energy of the uncompromising Abolitionists, and the less defined but rabid energy of the Southern fire-eaters: all these were known abroad and watched with gathering apprehension. American newspapers, and the extracts made from them by the leading journals of France and England, commanded more attention among the Americo-French and English than all other excitements of the time put together.

"Then followed what you all know—the election, with its radical result and the threats which immediately succeeded, that 'Old Abe Lincoln' should never live to be inaugurated! 'He shall not!' cried the South. 'He shall!' replied the North. To us who knew something of the Spanish knife and the Italian stiletto, the probabilities seemed to be that he would never live to reach Washington. Then the mutterings of the thunder grew deeper and deeper, and some disruption seemed inevitable, evident to us far away, while you at home, it seemed, were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, holding gala-days and enjoying yourselves generally, on the brink of an arousing volcano from which the sulphurous smoke already began to ascend to the heavens! So time passed on; autumn became winter, and December was rolling away.

"I was sitting with half-a-dozen friends in the chess-room at Very's, about eleven o'clock on the night of the twentieth of December, talking over some of the marvellous successes which had been won by Paul Morphy when in Paris, and the unenviable position in which Howard Staunton had placed himself by keeping out of the lists through evident fear of the New-Orleanian, when Adolph Von Berg came behind me and laid his hand on my shoulder.

"'Come with me a moment,' he said, 'you are wanted!'

"'Where?' I asked, getting up from my seat and following him to the door, before which stood a light coupe, with its red lights flashing, the horse smoking, and the driver in his seat.

"'I have been to-night to the Rue la Reynie Ogniard!' he answered.

"'And are you going there again?' I asked, my blood chilling a little with an indefinable sensation of terror, but a sense of satisfaction predominating at the opportunity of seeing something more of the mysterious woman.

"'I am!' he answered, 'and so are you! She has sent for you! Come!'

"Without another word I stepped into the coupe, and we were rapidly whirled away. I asked Adolph how and why I had been summoned; but he knew nothing more than myself, except that he had visited the sorceress at between nine and ten that evening, that she had only spoken to him for an instant, but ordered him to go at once and find his friend, the American, whom he had falsely introduced some months before as the English baron. He had been irresistibly impressed with the necessity of obedience, though it would break in upon his own arrangements for the later evening, (which included an hour at the Chateau Rouge;) had picked up a coupe, looked in for me at two or three places where he thought me most likely to be at that hour in the evening, and had found me at Very's, as related. What the sorceress could possibly want of me, he had no more idea than myself; but he reminded me that she had hinted at the possible necessity of sending for me at no distant period, and I remembered the fact too well to need the reminder.

"It was nearly midnight when we drove down the Rue St. Denis, turned into La Reynie Ogniard, and drew up at the antiquated door I had once entered nearly three months earlier. We entered as before, rang the bell as before, and were admitted into the inner room by the same slattern girl. I remember at this moment one impression which this person made upon me—that she did not wash so often as four times a year, and that the same old dirt was upon her face that had been crusted there at the time of my previous visit. There seemed no change in the room, except that two tapers, and each larger than the one I had previously seen, were burning upon the table. The curtain was down as before, and when it suddenly rose, after a few minutes spent in waiting, and the blood-red woman stood in the vacant space, all seemed so exactly as it had done on the previous visit, that it would have been no difficult matter to believe the past three months a mere imagination, and this the same first visit renewed.

"The illusion, such as it was, did not last long, however. The sorceress fixed her eyes full upon me, with the red flame seeming to play through the eyeballs as it had before done through her cheeks, and said, in a voice lower, more sad and broken, than it had been when addressing me on the previous occasion:

"'Young American, I have sent for you, and you have done well to come. Do not fear—'

"'I do not fear—you, or any one!' I answered, a little piqued that she should have drawn any such impression from my appearance. I may have been uttering a fib of magnificent proportions at the moment, but one has a right to deny cowardice to the last gasp, whatever else he must admit.

"'You do not? It is well, then!' she said in reply, and in the same low, sad voice. 'You will have courage, then, perhaps, to see what I will show you from the land of shadows.'

"'Whom does it concern?' I asked. 'Myself or some other?'

"'Yourself, and many others—all the world!' uttered the lips of flame. 'It is of your country that I would show you.'

"'My country? God of heaven! what has happened to my country?' broke from my lips almost before I knew what I was uttering. I suppose the words came almost like a groan, for I had been deeply anxious over the state of affairs known to exist at home, and perhaps I can be nearer to a weeping child when I think of any ill to my own beloved land, than I could be for any other evil threatened in the world.

"'But a moment more, and you shall see!' said the sorceress. Then she added: 'You have a friend here present. Shall he too look on what I have to reveal, or will you behold it alone?'

"'Let him see!' I answered. 'My native land may fall into ruin, but she can never be ashamed!'

"'So let it be, then!' said the sorceress, solemnly. 'Be silent, look, and learn what is at this moment transpiring in your own land!'

"Beneath that adjuration I was silent, and the same dread stillness fell upon my companion. Suddenly the sorceress, still standing in the same place, waved her right hand in the air, and a strain of low, sad music, such as the harps of angels may be continually making over the descent of lost spirits to the pit of suffering, broke upon my ears. Von Berg too heard it, I know, for I saw him look up in surprise, then apply his fingers to his ears and test whether his sense of hearing had suddenly become defective. Whence that strain of music could have sprung I did not know, nor do I know any better at this moment. I only know that, to my senses and those of my companion, it was definite as if the thunders of the sky had been ringing.

"Then came another change, quite as startling as the music and even more difficult to explain. The room began to fill with a whitish mist, transparent in its obscurity, that wrapped the form of the sybil and finally enveloped her until she appeared to be but a shade. Anon, another and larger room seemed to grow in the midst, with columned galleries and a rostrum, and hundreds of forms in wild commotion, moving to and fro, though uttering no sound. At one moment, it seemed that I could look through one of the windows of the phantom building, and I saw the branches of a palmetto tree waving in the winter wind. Then amidst and apparently at the head of all, a white-haired man stood upon the rostrum, and as he turned down a long scroll from which he seemed to be reading to the assemblage, I read the words that appeared on the top of the scroll: 'An ordinance to dissolve the union heretofore existing between the State of South Carolina and the several States of the Federal Union, under the name of the United States of America.' My breath came thick, my eyes filled with tears of wonder and dismay, and I could see no more.

"'Horror!' I cried. 'Roll away the vision, for it is false! It cannot be that the man lives who could draw an ordinance to dissolve the Union of the United States of America!'

"'It is so! That has this day been done!' spoke the voice of the sorceress from within the cloud of white mist.

"'If this is indeed true,' I said, 'show me what is the result, for the heavens must bow if this work of ruin is accomplished!'

"'Look again, then!' said the voice. The strain of music, which had partially ceased for a moment, grew louder and sadder again, and I saw the white mist rolling and changing, as if a wind were stirring it. Gradually again it assumed shape and form; and in the moonlight, before the Capitol of the nation, its white proportions gleaming in the wintry ray, the form of Washington stood, the hands clasped, the head bare, and the eyes cast upward in the mute agony of supplication.

"'All is not lost!' I shouted more than spoke, 'for the Father of his Country still watches his children, and while he lives in the heavens and prays for the erring and wandering, the nation may yet be reclaimed.'

"'It may be so,' said the voice through the mist, 'for look!'

"Again the strain of music sounded, but now louder and clearer, and without the tone of hopeless sadness. Again the white mists rolled by in changing forms, and when once more they assumed shape and consistency, I saw great masses of men, apparently in the streets of a large city, throwing out the old flag from roof and steeple, lifting it to heaven in attitudes of devotion, and pressing it to their lips with those wild kisses which a mother gives to her darling child when it has been just rescued from a deadly peril.

"'The nation lives!' I shouted. 'The old flag is not deserted and the patriotic heart yet beats in American bosoms! Show me yet more, for the next must be triumph!'

"'Triumph indeed!' said the voice. 'Behold it, and rejoice at it while there is time!' I shuddered at the closing words, but another change in the strain of music roused me. It was not sadness now, nor yet the rising voice of hope, for martial music rung loudly and clearly, and through it I heard the roar of cannon and the cries of combatants in battle. As the vision cleared, I saw the armies of the Union in fight with a host almost as numerous as themselves, but savage, ragged and tumultuous, and bearing a mongrel flag that I had never seen before—one that seemed robbed from the banner of the nation's glory. For a moment the battle wavered and the forces of the Union seemed driven backward; then they rallied with a shout, and the flag of stars and stripes was rebaptized in glory. They pressed the traitors backward at every turn—they trod rebellion under their heels—they were everywhere, and everywhere triumphant.

"'Three cheers for the Star-Spangled Banner!' I cried, forgetting place and time in the excitement of the scene. 'Let the world look on and wonder and admire! I knew the land that the Fathers founded and Washington guarded could not die! Three cheers—yes, nine—for the Star-Spangled Banner and the brave old land over which it floats!'

"'Pause!' said the voice, coming out once more from the cloud of white mist, and chilling my very marrow with the sad solemnity of its tone. 'Look once again!' I looked, and the mists went rolling by as before, while the music changed to wild discord; and when the sight became clear again, I saw the men of the nation struggling over bags of gold and quarrelling for a black shadow that flitted about in their midst, while cries of want and wails of despair went up and sickened the heavens! I closed my eyes and tried to close my ears, but I could not shut out the voice of the sorceress, saying once more from her shroud of white mist:

"'Look yet again, and for the last time! Behold the worm that gnaws away the bravery of a nation and makes it a prey for the spoiler!' Heart-brokenly sad was the music now, as the vision changed once more, and I saw a great crowd of men, each in the uniform of an officer of the United States army, clustered around one who seemed to be their chief. But while I looked, I saw one by one totter and fall, and directly I perceived that the epaulette or shoulder-strap on the shoulder of each was a great hideous yellow worm, that gnawed away the shoulder and palsied the arm and ate into the vitals. Every second, one fell and died, making frantic efforts to tear away the reptile from its grasp, but in vain. Then the white mists rolled away, and I saw the strange woman standing where she had been when the first vision began. She was silent, the music was hushed, Adolph Von Berg had fallen back asleep in his chair, and drawing out my watch, I discovered that only ten minutes had elapsed since the sorceress spoke her first word.

"'You have seen all—go!' was her first and last interruption to the silence. The instant after, the curtain fell. I kicked Von Berg to awake him, and we left the house. The coupe was waiting in the street and set me down at my lodgings, after which it conveyed my companion to his. Adolph did not seem to have a very clear idea of what had occurred, and my impression is that he went to sleep the moment the first strain of music commenced.

"As for myself, I am not much clearer than Adolph as to how and why I saw and heard what I know that I did see and hear. I can only say that on that night of the twentieth of December, 1860, the same on which, as it afterward appeared, the ordinance of secession was adopted at Charleston, I, in the little old two-story house in the Rue la Reynie Ogniard, witnessed what I have related.

"I left Havre in the old Arago only a fortnight afterwards. Perhaps the incident helped to drive me home. At all events I was ashamed to remain abroad when the country was in danger. Now you know quite as much of the affair as myself—which is not saying much!"

"Ugh!" said Harding, drawing an evident sigh of relief at the conclusion of so long a story, which had yet been so absorbingly interesting to him, under the circumstances, that he could not go to sleep in the midst of it—"Ugh! your idea—I beg your pardon!—your relation of the great yellow worms and their affinity to shoulder-straps, is almost enough to make a man, however patriotic, shudder at the thought of assuming such a decoration."

"I believe you, my boy!" said Leslie, quoting an expressive vulgarism which Orpheus C. Kerr had just been making so extensively popular.

"And that female combination of ghastly red and magical knowledge—"

"That remarkable combination," said Leslie, anticipating and interrupting the half-sneer that was coming—"is the red woman whom I saw to-night in the house on Prince Street, just before I fell out of the tree; and it was her voice that I heard on the piazza yonder just before the door opened. What do you think of it?"

"Think?" said Harding, earnestly this time. "I am altogether too much wrapped in that remarkable white mist that you have been shaking round me, to think! Then the events of to-night—so much crowded in a little space, and that woman coming into the midst of it all! My life has been a rather plain one, so far, and I have had to do with very few mysteries; but here I am tumbling into the midst of one thicker than the fog on the East River in a February thaw!"

"And yet the mystery of the two houses, and of the red woman so far as possible, I am going to go through like the proverbial streak of lightning through a gooseberry-bush, before I have done with it!" said Leslie, his habitual good opinion of his own powers coming once more into play. "You are ready to go with me?"

"All the way!" said Harding, graphically; and it was then that after a few words of arrangement the two friends parted, to catch what might still remain of uneasy morning slumber, in which red women, flying carriage-lamps and respectable young men skulking in doorways and areas, were very likely to be prominent.



CHAPTER VI.

COLONEL EGBERT CRAWFORD AND BELL CRAWFORD—SOME SPECULATIONS ON THE SPY SYSTEM—JOSEPHINE HARRIS ON A RECONNOISSANCE, AND WHAT SHE SAW AND HEARD.

At any other time than the present, before proceeding with the relation of the events that transpired in the house on West 3— Street after the arrival of Colonel Egbert Crawford and Miss Bell Crawford,—it might be both proper and politic to indulge in a disquisition on the meanness of peeping and the general iniquity of the spy system. At any other time—not now, when the country is deep in the horrors of a war that principally seems to have been a failure on our side because we have not "peeped" and "spied" enough.[2] The rebels have had the advantage of us from the beginning,—not only because they were fighting comparatively on their own ground and among a friendly population, but because they at once applied the spy system when they began, and nosed out all our secrets of army and cabinet, while we have neglected spying and scouting, and made every important military movement a plunge in the dark.

[Footnote 2: December 15th, 1862.]

Every military commander has blamed every other military commander for inefficiency in this respect, and when brought to the test he has showed that he himself had a terra incognita to go over in making his first advance. Quite a number of well-known people who were present may remember a few words of conversation which took place on the Union Course at one of the contests there between Princess and Flora Temple (was it not?) in June, 1861. Schenck had just plunged a few regiments, huddled up in railroad cars, into the mouths of the rebel batteries at Vienna, as if he had been taking a contract to feed some great military monster with victims as quickly and in as compact a form as possible. The country was horrified over the slaughter, Ball's Bluff and Fredericksburgh not having yet offered up their holocausts to dwarf it by comparison. An officer of prominence under McDowell, then in command of the Potomac Army under Scott, had come home on a furlough and was present. Many inquiries were made of him by acquaintances, as to the progress and prospects of the war. Among other things, the Vienna blunder was called to his attention.

"Oh," said the officer—"that was one of the most stupid of blunders—all owing to the fact that the ground had not been properly reconnoitered beforehand! They seem to have had neither scouts nor spies, and what else than failure could be the result?"

"True," said one of the bystanders. "And the Potomac army—that is going to advance pretty soon, as I hear—is that all right in the respect you have named?"

"What? McDowell's army?" said the officer, contemptuously. "When you catch Irwin McDowell not knowing exactly what is ahead of him and around him, you will catch a weasel asleep!"

So all the bystanders believed, and were confident accordingly. Four weeks afterwards Irwin McDowell fought the battle of Manassas, the result of which showed the most utter ignorance of the opposing fortifications and forces in front, that had ever been recorded in any history![3]

[Footnote 3: December, 1862.]

So much for the confidence that one entertains, of being able to avoid the blunders of the other! Not one of the predecessors of Scherazaide, it is probable, went to the marriage bed of the Sultan without believing that she could fix the wavering love of the tyrant and avoid the fate threatened for the morrow! And yet some hundreds of fair white bosoms furnished a morning banquet to the fishes, before Scherazaide the Wise succeeded in entangling the Sultan in the meshes of her golden speech!

It may be a little difficult to guess what this has to do with the narration. Simply this—that one of the most amiable and fascinating of women played what might have been called "a mean trick" on the occasion, and there has seemed to exist some occasion for making her excuse before relating the iniquity. Having settled that during the War for the Union there has not been half enough of "spying," on the side of right,—and having before us not only the examples of John Champe and Nathan Hale, beloved of Washington, but of the two estimable young men not long emerged from under the area steps in 5— Street, let us dismiss the contempt with which we have been wont to regard Paul Pry and Betty the housemaid, listening at key-holes, in our favorite dramas, and look mercifully upon the peccadilloes of Miss Josephine Harris.

Colonel Egbert Crawford, who entered the room of the invalid on that occasion, was a tall and rather fine-looking man, with the least dash of iron-gray in his hair and a decidedly soldierly bearing. He had dark eyes, a little too small and not always direct in their glance, but only close observers would have been able to make the latter discovery. Had he been wise, he would have worn something more than the full moustache and military side-whiskers, for the under lip and chin being close shaven the play of the muscles of the lip, and its shape, were visible. The lip was heavy and sullen, if not cruel; and any one who watched him closely enough (close as Josephine Harris had sometimes been watching him, say!) could see that the under lip had an almost constant twitching motion, and that the hands, when unoccupied, were always opening and shutting themselves much too often for a mind at ease. He was dressed in the full regulation blue uniform, with fatigue-cap, in spite of the heat of the weather, and with the eagle on shoulder and the red belts and gilt hook at waist suggesting the sword that was to come some time or other.

Miss Bell or Isabella Crawford, sister of Richard, who made her appearance with the Colonel after her more or less successful search for the peculiar shade of cerise ribbon,—demands a word of description, and only a word. She was of medium height, well formed and rather plump, with a pleasantly-moulded face and dark hair and eyes, undeniably handsome and ladylike, but with something weak and languid about the mouth, and indefinably creating the impression of a woman incapable of being quite content with affairs as they came, unless they came very pleasantly and fashionably, or of making any well-directed effort to improve them. She was faultlessly dressed and irreproachably gloved, and a close observer would have judged, after a minute inspection, that she would be better at home in the pleasant idleness of a ball or an opera-matinee than where she might be required either to do or to bear.

"A nice couple and belong together! Neither one of them good for anything!" had more than once been Joe Harris' irreverent comment, when looking at them as they entered or left carriage or ball room, a little earlier in her acquaintance and when she had not yet enjoyed so many opportunities for studying the peculiar character of Col. Egbert Crawford. Just now she would have had her doubts about sacrificing even the useless Bell to a man whom she herself began to dislike so much.

"How do you feel, brother?" asked the sister as she came in,—evidently more as a matter of duty than because she felt any peculiar interest in the answer.

"You look pale—your face is drawn—you seem to be in pain!" was the observation of the Colonel, before the invalid could answer, and taking the hand of the latter without seeming to notice the shudder with which his touch was met.

"Perhaps so—cousin—Egbert—yes—I do not feel quite so well as I have done," muttered the invalid, who seemed all the while to be making a violent effort to command face and feeling. "There was music in the street, you know—I heard it and I suppose that it agitated me."

"Sorry! tut! tut! tut! You ought to be getting better by this time, I should think!" said the Colonel, laying his finger on the pulse of Richard and looking up at vacancy as a Doctor has the habit of doing when he performs that very imposing (imposing upon whom?) operation. What was there in his glance, that met the eye of Joe Harris, as he did so—and gave her so plain a confirmation of her worst suspicions? What power is it that lets in the daylight on our darkest wishes and worst motives, just at the moment when we flatter ourselves that we have them more carefully hidden away in darkness than ever before? Joe was still at the window, where she had been joined by Bell, the latter already half-forgetful of her sick brother and eager to show some astounding purchase she had just made at one of the dry-goods palaces.

"There—go away, girls; you bother poor Richard with your chatter!" said Colonel Egbert, affecting great cordiality and a little familiarity. (The fact was, as may have been noticed, that Bell had spoken only five words aloud and Joe not a word, since the two had entered.) "Richard is not so well, I am afraid. I will sit by him awhile and you may go away and gabble to your heart's content."

"Just as you like," answered Isabella, doubling up a half-unrolled little package and preparing to go. "I have some little things to look after up-stairs. Will you go with me, Joe? Of course you are not going away until after dinner?"

"Humph! I do not know that I am going away at all!" said the wild girl, her words very different from her thought at the moment. "You are such nice people, and Dick is such an interesting invalid, and who knows—well, I will not speculate any more about that, in public, just yet! Yes, Bell, go up-stairs and attend to your finery; I am going down into the basement to ask Norah for two slices of bread-and-butter and the wing of a cold chicken!"

And away through the noiseless glass door buzzed Josephine, on her way to the basement, followed by Isabella on her way to the inner penetralia of the second floor; while Col. Egbert Crawford shied his fatigue-cap at the desk and drew up his chair to the side of the sofa occupied by the invalid. Isabella really went up-stairs, and for the purpose designated. Shame for Joe Harris, it must be said that while she really descended to the basement and made an inroad on Norah's larder to the extent of the wing of cold chicken and one slice of bread-and-butter, yet she thrust both the edibles into a piece of paper and into her pocket, at the imminent risk of greasing the latter convenient receptacle, and was back again on the parlor floor within the space of one and a half minutes by the little Geneva watch which she carried so bewitchingly at her belt. If mischief and sad earnest can both be blended in the expression of one face at one and the same time, they were so blended in hers at that moment. What was in the wind and who was to suffer?—for suffer somebody always did when Josey fairly started out on a campaign!

From the door leading to the basement, to that opening into the parlor from the hall, she probably stepped lighter than she had ever before done since playing blind-man's buff in early girlhood; and it is doubtful whether that parlor door had ever before opened and shut with so little noise, since the skilful hanger first oiled the plated hinges. From the door to the back part of the room she went on tip-toe—the fact cannot be denied,—little noise as her light shoes would have made on the heavy velvet. We all have something of the cat about us—man and the other animals; though the quality developes itself under different circumstances. Pussy treads even softer than usual, when after the coveted cream; that larger pussy, the tiger, steals lightly towards the ambushed hunter who is to furnish him the next delicious meal; and "Tarquin's ravishing strides" are undoubtedly a misnomer, for the Roman must have been something more or less than man if he did not tip-toe his sandals or cast them off altogether, when he stole towards the midnight bed of Lucrece.

The cream for which Pussy Harris—shame upon her for that same!—was just then making an adventurous foray,—was a hearing of the conversation which might take place between Richard Crawford and his cousin! That conversation she had determined to hear, at all hazards; for what, she scarcely knew herself, but with an undefinable impression that she must hear it—that (Jesuitically, and of course most horrible doctrine!) the end might justify the otherwise indefensible means—and that—that—in short, that she was going to do it, and this settled the matter as well as finished up the reason!

The piano stood on the left, passing down from the parlor door towards the rear of the room, and behind it was a small inlaid table covered with books, and a large easy chair designed for lazy reading. Any person in the chair would be within twelve inches of the glass doors and not over ten feet from the two men at the sofa in the little back room. Josephine distinctly heard, through the thin glass, the hum of their voices as she approached the table, but not many of the words were audible. Confound it!—she thought—her plan of sitting in the chair, pretending to read as a safeguard against possible detection, and overhearing by laying her head back against the door—this would never do. Time was pressing—finesse must give way to boldness; and in the sixteenth of a minute thereafter the sliding doors were softly parted by less than half an inch of space—too little to be readily noticed from the back room, which was the lighter of the two, and yet enough to see through if necessary, (but she did not intend to look,) and to hear through, which was the matter of first consequence. And there she stood—an eaves-dropper of the first order—a flush of shame and of half-conscious guilt on cheek and brow, and a wild, startled look in her eyes, such as a hare might show when listening for the second bay of the hound—liable to be caught by some one entering the parlor from the hall, or by the Colonel taking a fancy to enter the room for any purpose—and yet chained there, with her ear within an inch of the opening, as if present happiness and eternal salvation had both depended upon her keeping that position!

Could anything be more shameful?—anything more despicable? Was ever a heroine so placed, even by English romancers or French dramatists? And was not the long dissertation at the beginning of this chapter, to prove the applicability of the spy system to war time, an absolute necessity?

What might have passed precedently, while she was looking after the chicken and the bread-and-butter, Josephine had no means of divining. At the time of her assuming her post of observation, Richard Crawford was still lying back upon the sofa, and looking up; as he had been half an hour before when she was herself conversing with him. If the spasms had not ceased altogether, they were at least conquered by the will and concealed from the eyes of the Colonel, as they had not been from hers. The young girl thought she could detect, too, upon the face of the invalid, a less hopeless look, and some evidence of more determined insight in the glance, than she had marked for a considerable period. Colonel Egbert Crawford was sitting with his chair drawn up reasonably close in front of his cousin, and conversing eagerly with him, yet with his face partially turned away most of the time, and not meeting his gaze directly as most honest and earnest men do the observation of those with whom they converse on important subjects. Perhaps that disposition of the Colonel's face gave both his seen and his unseen listeners better opportunities for close study of his expression than they might otherwise have enjoyed.

"I am sorry to say that things are not as we both wish them to be, at West Falls," the young girl heard the Colonel say. "Of course I am not less anxious than yourself to have everything arranged and the property—"

"Ah, there is some property involved, then! and at West Falls, of all the places in the world!" commented the uninvited listener, speaking to herself, and with her words very carefully kept between her teeth, as was becoming under such circumstances—always provided there could be anything "becoming" about the affair.

"Uncle John," the Colonel went on to say, "seems to have imbibed some kind of singular prejudice against your mode of life in the city, if not against you, and Mary—"

"Humph! there is a 'Mary'—a woman in the case, as well as the property," commented the listener. "Little while as I have been here, the thing already begins to grow interesting!"

"Well, Mary? what of her? Why does she answer my letters no more?" asked the invalid, calming his voice by an evidently strong effort and speaking as the Colonel paused for an instant. "Does she too begin to share so bitterly in the—in the—"

"In the prejudice? I am sorry to say—yes," the Colonel went on, "though I do not think that either of them could give a reason. I tried to probe the matter a little when there, but the old gentleman answered me so shortly that I had no excuse to go on; and Mary—"

"You did not say anything to her?" broke in the invalid, with the same evident suppression in his voice.

"Of course not!" was the answer. "You know me, Richard, I hope, and know that I would not have lost a chance of saying anything in your favor—"

"Trust you for that!" was the mental comment of the listener. "Wouldn't you glorify him! Wouldn't you make him blue and gold, with gilt edges! I see you doing it!"

"—If I had any opportunity," concluded the Colonel.

"I should think not," said the invalid, his words so forced from between his teeth that his interlocutor, had he been less absorbed in his own calculations, must have noticed the difference from his usual manner.

"Richard Crawford, you are beginning to wake, for you know that man is lying—I see it by your eyes!" was the comment of the young girl, this time.

"I am going to West Falls again in a few days—that is, if we do not get orders for Washington," continued the Colonel; "and if I have your permission—as you are not likely to be well enough to go out even by that time—I shall speak to both on the subject, as it would be the world's pity if you should be thrown out of so fine a property and the possession of a girl who I believe once loved you, by false reports, or—"

"False reports? eh? who should have circulated false reports?" asked the invalid, his face firing for a moment and his voice temporarily under less command. But the momentary flush passed away, and it was only with the querulous voice and petulant manner of sickness that he concluded: "Eh, well, no matter; we will see about all that by-and-by, when I get well."

"That is right—I am glad to hear you speak so hopefully," said the Colonel. "All will be right, no doubt, when you get well." Did he or did he not lay a peculiar stress on the two words, as the old jokers used to do on a few others when they informed the boys that the statue of St. Paul, in the niche in the front of St. Paul's church, always came down and took a drink of water from the nearest pump, when it heard the clock strike twelve? If there was such an emphasis, did Richard Crawford hear and recognize it? That some one else in the immediate vicinity did, and duly commented upon it, is beyond a question.

"You must modulate your voice better than that, Colonel Egbert Crawford, before you go on the stage!" said the wild girl. "You think he is dying—you mean he shall die—I have an impression that I did not come here for nothing, after all!"

"And now," said the Colonel, rising, and taking out his watch, "I must leave you. We have a recruiting meeting at —— Hall at six, and I must be there without fail. Oh," as if suddenly recollecting something comparatively unimportant, that had been overlooked in the pressure of more interesting matter—"I had nearly forgotten. Your bandage—is it all right? I hope the Doctor and Bell have not found out the secret, so as to laugh at what they would call our superstition. Shall I renew it? I believe I have some of the preparation in one or another of my pockets," feeling in one and then another, as if doubtful. "Ah, here it is," and he took out from one of his pockets which he had hurriedly gone over with his hands at least half a dozen of times, a small black box, four or five inches in length and perhaps two in width by an inch deep.

Were Josephine Harris' eyes playing fantastic tricks with her on that occasion; or did she see, as that little black box met the view, a momentary repetition of the suffering spasm which had crossed the face of Richard Crawford half an hour before, when she first suggested a conflict of interests between them? At all events the spasm, if such it was, passed away, and he merely answered, languidly:

"Yes, thank you, Egbert—yes, if you please."

At this stage of the proceedings, had Josephine Harris been a "real lady," or had she possessed any well-defined sense of "propriety," she would have left her post of observation on the instant. For though the Colonel was partially between her and the patient, she saw him open the little black box, take out a broad knife from his vest pocket, and then proceed to other operations very improper for a young lady to witness. She saw Richard Crawford unbutton his vest, a little assisted by the Colonel. What followed she could not see, very fortunately. All that she could make out, was that some sort of narrow white bandage seemed to have been removed from the breast or stomach of the invalid—that the Colonel took out a dark paste from the box with his knife, spread a portion of it on the opened bandage, then re-folded it and assisted in replacing it on the breast or stomach and re-arranging the disordered clothing. This done, and the box put back into his pocket, he took his cap and stooped down to shake hands with Richard; whereupon Josephine, knowing that his way out would be through the parlor, shoved the two doors together by a silent but very nervous movement, and managed to escape from the room as silently, before the Colonel's hand had yet been laid upon the glass door to open it.

There were half a dozen unoccupied rooms on the next floor, as she well knew, and up the stairs and into one of these she bounded, her cheeks still more aglow than they had been when she set out on her "reconnoissance," and her eyes still more wild and startled, while a strange tremor creeping at her heart told her that she had been witness to much more than could yet be shaped into words or embodied even in thought! Poor girl!—how her brain throbbed and how her heart beat like ten thousand little trip-hammers!—the usual and very proper penalty which we pay for an indiscretion!



CHAPTER VII.

INTRODUCTION OF THE CONTRABAND, WITH SOME REFLECTIONS THEREON—THREE MONTHS BEFORE—AUNT SYNCHY AND THE OBI POISONING—A NICE LITTLE ARRANGEMENT OF EGBERT CRAWFORD'S.

Here it becomes necessary to pause and introduce a new and altogether indispensable character. Not new to the world—sorrow for the world that it is not! Not new to the country—wo to the country that it has filled so large a place in its history! But something new in this veracious narration—the contraband. The negro must come in, by all means and at all hazards. Time was when romances and even histories could be written without such an introduction; but that time is past and perhaps past forever. "I and Napoleon," said the courier of Arves, relating some incident in which he had temporarily become associated with the fortunes of the Great Captain; and "I and the white man" may Sambo say at no distant day, without presumption and without outraging the dignity of position. It was a very harmless monster that Frankenstein constructed, apparently; but it grew to be a very fearful and tyrannical monster before he was quite done with it. No doubt the first black face that grinned on the Virginian shore, a couple of centuries ago, seemed more an object of mirth than of terror—and it certainly gave promise of profit. But he is a man of mirthful disposition who sees anything to laugh at in the same black face, grown older and broader and much less comical, on the shore of the same Virginia to-day. The white race and the black—the sharp profile and the broad lip—the springing instep and the protuberant heel—have been having a long tussle, with the probabilities for a while all on the side of the white: to-day the struggle is doubtful if not decided in favor of the black. "Here we go, up—up—uppy! Here we go, down—down—downy!" the children used to sing when playing see-saw with a broad plank on the fence; and they understood, what their elders sometimes forget—that the rebound of extreme height is descent. One more illustration, before this train of thought necessarily ceases.

Is it not recorded in all the books of relative history, that the Normans, under William the Conqueror, invaded and subjugated Saxon England and made virtual slaves of the unfortunate countrymen of Harold? Yet who were the conquered eventually? England was Saxon within fifty years of Hastings: England is Saxon to-day. The broad bosom of the Saxon mother, even when the sire of her child was a ravisher, gave out drops of strength that moulded it in spite of him, to be at last her avenger and his master! The Saxon pirate still sweeps the seas in his descendants: the Norman robber is only heard of at long intervals when he meets his opportunity at a Balaklava. The revenges of history are fearful; and if the end of human experience is not reached in our downfall, other races will be careful never to rivet a chain of caste or color, or so to rivet it that no meddling fingers of fanaticism can ever unloose the shackle!

Perhaps it is proper as well as inevitable that the negro should have changed his place and mounted astride of the national neck instead of being trodden under the national foot. Everything else in our surroundings has changed—why not he? We do not yet quite understand the fact—it may be; but the foundations of the old in society have been broken up as effectually, within the past two years, as were those of the great deep at the time of Noah's flood. The old deities of fashion have been swept away in the flood of revolution. The millionaire of two years ago, intent at that time on the means by which the revenues from his brown-stone houses and pet railroad stocks could be spent to the most showy advantage, has become the struggling man of to-day, intent upon keeping up appearances, and happy if diminished and doubtful rents can even be made to meet increasing taxes. The struggling man of that time has meanwhile sprung into fortune and position, through lucky adventures in government transportations or army-contracts; and the jewelers of Broadway and Chestnut Street are busy resetting the diamonds of decayed families, to sparkle on brows and bosoms that only a little while ago beat with pride at an added weight of California paste or Kentucky rock-crystal. The most showy equipages that flashed last summer at Newport and Saratoga, were never seen between the bathing-beach and Fort Adams, or between Congress Spring and the Lake, in the old days; and on the "Dinorah" nights at the Academy[4] there have been new faces in the most prominent boxes, almost as outre and unaccustomed in their appearance as was that of the hard-featured Western President, framed in a shock head and a turn-down collar, meeting the gaze of astonished Murray Hill, when he passed an hour there on his way to the inauguration.

[Footnote 4: December 1862.]

Quite as notable a change has taken place in personal reputation. Many of the men on whom the country depended as most likely to prove able defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall. Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly—impotent for good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile sprung forth from the mass of the people, and equally astonished themselves and others by the power, wisdom and courage they have displayed. In cabinet and camp, in army and navy, in the editorial chair and in the halls of eloquence, the men from whom least was expected have done most, and those upon whom the greatest expectations had been founded have only given another proof of the fallacy of all human calculations. All has been change, all has been transition, in the estimation men have held of themselves and the light in which they presented themselves to each other.

Opinions of duties and recognitions of necessities have known a change not less remarkable. What yesterday we believed to be fallacy, to-day we know to be the truth. What seemed the fixed and immutable purpose of God only a few short months ago, we have already discovered to have been founded only in human passion or ambition. What seemed eternal has passed away, and what appeared to be evanescent has assumed stability. The storm has been raging around us, and doing its work not the less destructively because we failed to perceive that we were passing through anything more threatening than a summer shower. While we have stood upon the bank of the swelling river, and pointed to some structure of old rising on the bank, declaring that not a stone could be moved until the very heavens should fall, little by little the foundations have been undermined, and the full crash of its falling has first awoke us from our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live, has fallen and been destroyed; and yet we know not whether the nation dies, or grows to a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete but reliable old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is springing forth a new so unexpected and so little prepared for that it may be salvation or destruction as the hand of God shall rule. The past of the nation lies with the sunken Cumberland in the waters of Hampton Roads; its future floats about in a new-fangled Monitor, that may combat and defeat the navies of the world or go to the bottom with one inglorious plunge.[5] And this general transition brings us back to the negro, whose apotheosis is after all only a part of the inevitable, and may be only the flash before his final and welcome disappearance.

[Footnote 5: Written three days before the foundering of the Monitor off Hatteras, Dec. 31st 1862.]

Our contraband is a woman, and she comes upon the scene of action in this wise, retrospectively.

Some three months before the events recorded in the preceding chapters, to wit about the middle of March, Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, doing a thriving business in the line especially affected by such gentry, and not yet elevated to a Colonel's commission in the volunteer army by the parental forethought of Governor Edwin D. Morgan,—had occasion to visit that portion of Thomas Street lying between West Broadway and Hudson. The locality is not by any means a pleasant one, either for the eye or the other senses, and the character of the street is not materially improved by the recollection of the Ellen Jewett murder, which occurred on the south side, within a few doors of Hudson. Garbage left unremoved by Hackley festers alike on pavement, sidewalk and gutter; and a mass of black and white humanity (the former predominating) left unremoved by the civilization of New York in the last half of the nineteenth century, festers within the crazy and tumble-down tenements. Colored cotton handkerchiefs wrapping woolly heads, and shoes slouched at the heel furnishing doubtful covering to feet redolent of filth and crippled by disease—alternate with the scanty habiliments of black and white children, brought up in the kennel and reduced by blows, mud and exposure to a woful similarity of hue. The whiskey bottle generally accompanies the basket with a quart of decayed potatoes, from the grocery at the corner; and even the begged calf's-liver or the stolen beef-bone comes home accompanied by a flavor of bad gin. It is no wonder that the few shutters hang by the eye-lids, and that even the wagon-boys who vend antediluvian vegetables from castaway wagons drawn by twenty-shilling horse-frames, hurry through without any hope in the yells intended to attract custom.

Any observer who should have seen the neatly-dressed lawyer peering into the broken doors and up the black staircases of Thomas Street, would naturally have supposed his visit connected with some revelation of crime, and that he was either looking up a witness whose testimony might be necessary to save a perilled burglar from Sing Sing, or taking measures to keep one hidden who might have told too much if brought upon the witness-stand. And yet Egbert Crawford was really visiting that den of black squalor with a very different object—to find an old darkey woman who was reported as living in that street, and in his capacity as one of the eleven hundred and fifty Commissioners of Deeds of the City and County of New York, to procure her "X mark" and take her acknowledgment in the little matter of a quitclaim deed. A very harmless purpose, in itself, certainly; and yet the observer might have been nearer right in his suspicion than even the lawyer himself believed, when the whole result of the visit was taken into account.

One of the ricketty houses on the south side of the street, not far from the Ellen Jewett house, and not much further from the equally celebrated panel-house which furnished the weekly papers with illustrations of that peculiar species of man-trap a few years ago—seemed to the seeker to bear out the description that had been given him. The door was wide open, and all within appeared to be a sort of dark cabin out of which issued occasional sounds of quarrelling voices and continual puffs of fetid air foul enough to sicken the strongest stomach. He went in, as one of the lost might go into Pandemonium, impelled by an imperious necessity. He mounted the ricketty and creaking stair, with the bannister half gone and the steps groaning beneath his tread as if they contained the spirits of the dead respectability that had left them half a century before. He had been told that the old woman lived on the third floor, and though he met no one he concluded to dare the perils of a second ascent, in spite of the landing place being in almost pitchy darkness. Rushing along with a hasty step that even the gloom could not make a slower one, he felt something bump against his knees and the lower part of his body, and then something human fell to the floor with a crash that had the jingling of broken crockery blended with it.

"Boo! hoo! hoo! e-e-e-gh! Mammy! Mammy!" yelled a voice. "Boo! hoo! hoo! e-e-e-gh! Mammy! Mammy!" and Crawford could just discern that he had run over and partially demolished a little negro boy carrying a pitcher, the pitcher and the boy seeming to have suffered about equally. Neither of them had any nose left, to speak of; and the little imp did not make any effort to rise from the floor, but lay there and yelled merrily. The victor in the collision did not have much time for inspection, for the moment after a door at the back end of the passage opened hurriedly, and a hideous old negro woman came rushing out, with a sputtering fragment of lighted tallow-candle in her hand, and exclaiming:

"What's de matter, Jeffy? Here am Mamma!"

"Big man run'd ober me! broke de pitcher! Boo! hoo! hoo!" yelled the black atom in reply, without any additional effort at getting up.

"Get out ob dar! d—n you, I run'd ober you, mind dat!" screeched out the old woman, catching sight of the dark form of Crawford. "Hurtin' leetle boys!—I pay you for it, honey!"

"I hit him accidentally," said the lawyer, who had no intention of getting into a row in that "negro quarter." "It was dark, and I did not see him. I'll pay for the pitcher."

"Will you, honey?" said the old woman, mollifying instantly. "Well den, 'spose you couldn't help it. Get up, Jeffy."

"Can you tell me whether Mrs. —— lives on any of the floors of this house?" asked Crawford.

"Nebber mind dat, till you gib me de money!" answered the old woman, not to be diverted by any side-issues. "Dat are pitcher cost a quarter, honey!"

Crawford was feeling in his pocket for one of the quarters that yet remained in that receptacle, preparatory to going out of circulation altogether,—when the old crone, eager for the money, stuck her candle somewhat nearer his face than it had before been held. Instantly her withered face assumed a new expression of intelligence, and her hand shook so that she almost dropped the candle, as she cried:

"Merciful Lord and Marser! If dat are ain't young Egbert Crawford!"

"My name is certainly Egbert Crawford!" said that individual, very much surprised in his turn. "But who are you that know me?"

"Don't know his ole Aunt Synchy!" exclaimed the old woman.

"Aunt Synchy! Aunt Synchy!" said the lawyer, trying to recollect the past very rapidly, and catching some glimmers. "What? Aunt Synchy that used to live at—"

"Used to live at old Tom Crawford's. Lor bress you, yes! Why come in, honey!" and before the lawyer could answer further, he was literally dragged through the dingy door by the still vigorous old woman, and found himself inside her apartment, Master Jeffy and his pitcher being left neglected on the entry floor.

Once within the door, and in the better light afforded even by the dingy windows, Crawford had a better opportunity to observe the old woman, and he now found no difficulty in recalling something more than the name. She might have been sixty-five or seventy years of age, to judge by the wrinkles on her face and the white of her eyebrows, though her hair was hidden under a gaudy and dirty cotton plaid handkerchief and her tall form seemed little bowed by age. Two coal-black eyes, showing no diminution of their natural fire, gleamed from under those white eyebrows; and on the portions of the cheeks yet left smooth enough to show the texture of the skin, there were deep gashes that had once been the tattooing of her barbarian youth and beauty. Her hands were withered, much more than her face, and seemed skinny and claw-like. Her dress, which had once been plaid cotton gingham, was fearfully dirty and unskilfully patched with other material; and the frayed silk shawl thrown around her old shoulders might have been rescued from a rag-heap in the streets to serve that turn.

The room, as Crawford readily noticed, was almost as remarkable in appearance as the old woman herself. There was nothing singular in the bare floor, the pine table and two or three broken chairs; for something very like them, or worse, can be found in almost every miserable tenement where virtue struggles or vice swelters, in the slums of the great city. Neither was there anything notable in the smoke-greased walls and ceiling, the miserable fire-place with one cracked kettle and a red earthen bowl, and the wretched bed of rags stuck away in one of the corners, on which evidently both the old crone and Master Jeffy made their sad pretence at sleep.