A family secret

Preface

A PREFACE is almost a work of supererogation, since few people ever stop to look at it; though it would be but fair, before passing judgment on an author, to see what he may have to say for himself.

It is unfair, for instance, to find fault with a book for not fulfilling purposes which it was never designed to fulfill; and by way of disarming such criticism, it may as well be stated, in the outset, that the present volume is very simple and unpretending in its aims, being written solely to amuse. It is not a sugar-coated pill to doctor public morals ; it does not pretend to convey instruction on any subject, nor does it aspire, as a work of art, to portray grand and lofty passions ; but if it shall help to while away one weary hour, if it shall beguile one heavy heart into momentary forgetfulness of its burden, the writer will feel that it has not been given to the world in vain.

One caution it may be best, perhaps, not to omit here. Some sensitive critics may imagine that the character of JEneas Tadpole is intended as a satire upon the ministers of religion. Far be such a thought from the heart of this writer. The character named is merely designed as a portrayal of ineffable meanness, and hypocrisy, as the basest of meanness, is made his predominant trait.

And now, the author having pleaded its cause, the work must stand its trial at the bar of public opinion, the highest tribunal to whose judgment a writer can appeal. Trusting the verdict may be a favorable one, the author commits the work to its fate.

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CONTENTS,

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Mrs. Bottom’s Hotel . 7

IT. Waiting eor the Train 15

III. A Lady shows her King 21

IV. A Tress of Hair 28

Y. Mr. Chance makes a New Acquaintance . . . .29

VI. Some Scraps of Family History . , J , , , 32

VII. Going Home 36

VIII. The Bruens 41

IX. Family Connections 45

X. The Credit of the Family is in Danger .... 50

XI. Audley conforms to the Customs of the Country . . 52

XII. A Bend Sinister and a Halter 55

XIII. Quasimodo .61

XIV. Mr. Bruen carries his Point 65

XV. Mr. Bruen as Envoy Extraordinary 69

XVI. Was it a Ghost? 73

XVII. The Young Savage Tamed . . 76

XVIII. A Minister of the Gospel 78

XIX. Kuth makes a Friend 82

XX. ^neas Falls into the Hands of the Philistines . , 88

XXI. The Tournament 96

XXII. A Suspicious Character 101

XXin. The Tournament Ball 106

XXIV. A Friendly Warning 110

XXV. The Bird has Flown 115

XXVI. In the Bowels of the Earth 120

XXVII. Filthy Lucre 125

XXVIII. How Audley Malvern commenced Bringing Things to a

Crisis 130

XXIX. .^NEAS MAKES A DECLARATION . . . . * . . 134

XXX. Audley comes very near making a Fool of Himself. . 136

XXXI. Kuth’s Plot, and What Came of It 139

XXXII. The Blonde Curl . ' . 146

XXXIII. JEneas makes a Kevelation 150

XXXIV. A Clue to the Mystery 154

XXXV; The Pride of the Malverns has a Fall .... 158

XXXVI. The Major put to Rout 164

XXXVII. Under the Black Flag 169

XXXVIII. Shooting a Man in the Back 172

XXXIX. George Dalton receives a Telegraphic Dispatch . . 176

XL. A Gunpowder Plot 178

XLI. Kizpah 181

XLII. A Descent into Hell 185

XLIII. A Resurrection from the Dead 188

XLIV. The Mystery Solved 189

XLV. George Dalton Hardens his Heart 195

XLVI. Out of the Jaws of Death .... . . 200

XLVII. Mr. George Bruen objects to turning a Somersault . 202

XLVIII. A Wedding or a Funeral? 206

XLIX. Everybody gets Married, and Lives Happy Forever After 211

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Chapter 1

MRS. Bottoms’s hotel.

“ Four hours more I This is the deuce of a business, waiting half the morning at a confounded little country station without even a cigar to help a fellow pass the time I” And the speaker turned, with a gesture of impatience, from the window of the car, through which he had been conversing with some one outside. He was a strikingly handsome young man, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant in the United States army, and apparently just entering upon his third decade of life. He sat still for a few moments, with his hands in his pockets, looking intensely out of humor, then rose as if to leave the car, but paused before turning towards the door, while an amused smile crept over his features as he surveyed the scene around him.

It was not a very inviting one. “ Pullman sleepers” were unknown in those days, and the early dawn of a sultry August morning glared hot and red upon the tired passengers, tumbled about in confused heaps on the hard, comfortless benches. The picture was as grotesque as it was cheerless. The train had not been in motion for more than an hour, and most of the passengers were beginning to rouse themselves and inquire peevishly into the cause of the delay, though some favored few, possessed of an admirable talent for sleeping under difficulties, were still snoring away in blissful unconsciousness of wry necks and twisted spines. One very pretty young lady was crushing her bonnet against the side of the car with stolid insensibility, and a skittish old widower just in front, who had lost his wig, slumbered on as tranquilly as if his bald scalp had not been shining full in the face of unconscious beauty. Further on a rural member of the Legislature, who had taken off his shoes and hung his stockinged feet out at the window for the edification of the traveling public, was still serenely sleeping, with his head dangling over the wooden arm of the seat into the passway, while the red morning sun streamed full upon his face, and the flies* whisked around his wide-open mouth at pleasure. Most of the travelers, however, as we have said, were beginning to indulge in those preliminary yawnings and stretchings that betoken a general waking up, and our hero’s impatient exclamation, though not meant to be heard inside thecar, was received there with a growl of assent, chiming in, as it did so exactly,, with the state of public feeling.

“ What’s this confounded delay about,, anyhow?” inquired a stout old gentleman over the way, shaking himself up into a sitting posture, and popping his red face out at the window.

“A freight-train just ahead of us smashed up last night,” answered our hero, who had been making inquiries of the people outside ; “ and they say it will be impossible to get the track clear for twenty-four hours, so there is nothing for it but to wait till the down-train comes in at ten o’clock, then change cars and let it turn back westward with us.”

Ten o’clock, the devil ! What time is it now?”

“Just a quarter to six. Halloo, my man,” continued the young officer, addressing one of the train -hands who entered just then with a can of water, “ what are our chances for breakfast this morning? I’m as empty as a charitybox !”

The man laughed, and cast a significant glance through the window towards the barren red hills, washed into yawning gullies, and interspersed with groves of scrubby pine that stretched in every direction far as the eye could reach.

“ Blackberries is gone,” he said, with

A FAMILY SECRET.

a jocose smile, as he 'withdrew his eyes from this silent survey of the unpromising landscape and fixed them upon the face of his interlocutor, “but if you wouldn’t mind walking a mile or so,” he added, “ up to Mill Creek Junction, I reckon you can git a bit of something worth having at Mrs. Bottoms’s hotel. ’Taint the reg’lar breakfast house, Mill Creek ain’t, but she’s a tip-top ’un, Mrs. Bottoms is, and can cook a meal’s vittles as good as any queen.”

With this doubtful eulogy upon Mrs. Bottoms’s cuisine^ the man discharged a prodigious squirt of tobacco-juice by way of emphasis, and went about his business.

The lieutenant yawned, muttered something to himself in a tone of discontent, then put on his hat and started out, but •was detained as he passed the seat just back of his own by something pulling at his sleeve, and a soft, childish voice say-

“Will you move this, please? My dress is caught, and Father Perline has gone to sleep.”

The young ofiicer looked round and beheld a pretty little girl, some twelve or thirteen years old, tugging away with all her might at his valise, which had somehow slipped from its place and got wedged under the bench on which the child was sitting, drawing a fold of her dress along with it and pinning her down so fast that she could hardly move her lower limbs. By her side was reclining an elderly gentleman with a singularly attractive countenance, who might have been taken for her father but that he wore the garb of a Romish priest. Ilis head was resting against the paneling of the car, and he seemed to have just fallen into a light slumber, from which the child was too considerate to wake him. There was a quaint blending of womanly thoughtfulness and childish simplicity about her that amused the young man, and he became so absorbed in contemplating the sweet, upturned face that he forgot all about the child’s request until she again called his attention to it.

“ Please, will you take away your valise?” she repeated, in a less patient tone. “ I can’t move my foot with it there.”

Ashamed of his negligence, the young man darted at the offending article and drew it forth with such alacrity that he brought a piece of the child’s dress along with it.

“ There, now, what an awkward vagabond I am I” he said, eying the rent ruefully. “ I deserve that you should be very angry with me.”

“ Oh, no, that is nothing,” cried the little girl, good-humoredly. “ Sister Veronica is not here to inspect, and I will pin it up so that nobody can see. Besides,” she added, with a twinkle in her eye that betrayed her a veritable daughter of Eve in spite of her staid, nun-like habit, “ I am to have new things, and am to leave off* the ugly dress they wear at St. Catherine’s when we get to New Orleans.”

“ To New Orleans !” cried the young officer, in astonishment ; “ you are surely not going there ?”

“Why not?” asked the child, wondering at his surprise.

“ Why, the yellow fever ! There never was such an epidemic known as is raging there now, and people have fled by thousands in every direction till the city is almost depopulated.”

“That is just the reason why Father Perline is going,” said the child, quietly, “ because everybody else is running away, and there are none left to take care of the sick.”

“ But you are too little to take care of the sick ; why does Father Perline carry you with him ?”

“ To put me to school in the convent of St. Sacrament, where they go to learn music ; and, besides, I am not so little as you think me,” she added, drawing herself up with an air of offended dignity. “ In three years and a half I shall be sixteen, and that is almost as old as Yictorine Lament, the oldest of all the old, old girls that used to sit in Sister Lucretia’s room at St. Catherine’s and do exercises in geometry. I wonder if people often live to be as old as Yictorine, and Father Perline, and St. Joseph?”

The young officer laughed.

“ Not if they are put to school in plaguestricken cities,” he said, in an undertone *, then, raising his voice, he asked, “Are you not afraid of the fever, little one ?”

“No,” was the prompt reply, “that is,” added the child, after a moment’s consideration, “ I am not so much afraid of it as of Mr. Tadpole and that naughty boy iEneas, for my father said if 1 did not go to New Orleans with Father Perline I should be sent bact to Mr. Tadpole’s school.”

“ Her father !” muttered the young man to himself. “ Great God ! what murderous fanatics these Catholics are !”

“ But this child’s father is not a Catholic,” said a low, gentle voice, close to the

MRS, B0TT03fS^S HOTEL.

lieutenant’s ear ; and glancing round, he saw the priest, who had been roused by their conversation, regarding him with a look of mild reproach. The young man colored.

“ I beg your pardon, reverend father,” he began ; “ I am sorry if I have been surprised into committing a rudeness, but I could not help feeling shocked when I found you were taking this little one,” fixing his eyes again upon the child, who was now busy pinning up the rent in her dress, and seemed wholly unconscious that she was a subject of interest or remark to any one, “ into the very jaws of death. You have a right to dispose of your own life as you please, and I honor the greatness of soul that ”

“ No, no, young man, none of us has a right .to his own life,” replied the priest, interrupting him ; “ it belongs to God alone, and I cheerfully dispose of mine as he, through his Holy Church, may direct. In his name the Holy Mother sends me forth to minister to her dying children in my native city, and I have no right, even if I had a wish, to reject the mission.”

“ But, father,” persisted our hero, who was at an age when men feel much less diffident about taking their seniors to task than they become a few years later, and whose generous heart, moreover, prompted him to espouse, with all the ardor and indiscretion of youth, the cause of helpless innocence, ” do God and your church command you wantonly to sacrifice the life of an innocent child?”

^‘God commands us,” answered the priest, after a short pause, “ to care for the soul rather than the body. I Avould gladly have cherished both if I could, and left my precious little charge in the holy and safe retreat where I found her, till she could follow me without danger ; but her father directed otherwise, and the laws of the land place his authority above mine, — above even that of the Holy Church.”

“ What an unfeeling monster her father must be !” exclaimed the lieutenant, indignantly.

Quoniam pater mens et mater mea derelinqiierunt me, Dominus autem assumpsit me,'' said the priest, laying his hand caressingly on the child’s head. “And those for whom the world has no place the Holy Church receives into her bosom.”

A horrible suspicion crossed the young man’s mind as the priest uttered these words. He turned and looked hard at the speaker, who met his eyes with a frank, open gaze, which at once convinced him that whatever wrong might be meditated against the child by others, the worthy ecclesiastic had no hand in it. The good father seemed to divine what was passing in the young man’s breast, and he proceeded, as if answering the thought.

“ The father of this child is a stranger to me ; I have seen him but once, and he confided nothing to me as to his intentions regarding her, but merely stated the alternatives between which I was forced to choose, — either to take her with me at once, or send her back to a place where, if all I have heard be true, she would run quite as great risks from neglect and ill treatment as she will in New Orleans from yellow fever ; at all events, her own choice is to go with me. Buth,” he continued, appealing to the child, “ which would you rather do : go to New Orleans with Father Perline, and die of the fever, or be sent back to Mr. Tadpole?”

The child answered by throwing her arms round the good man’s neck and clinging passionately to him. Affection for Father Perline, and dread of Mr. Tadpole, were evidently the fundamental dogmas of poor little Ruth’s orthodoxy.

The passengers were all wide awake by this time, and our young friend felt that it would be out of place to continue longer a remonstrance which^ if he had been a few years older, he would have considered it impertinent to begin at all. He therefore dropped the subject, and invited his new acquaintances to join him in his walk to the Junction, and share his chances for getting breakfast. The priest declined for himself, but gratefully accepted the offer for Ruth, promising that he would join them in an hour or so, and relieve the lieutenant of his charge.

The little girl gave herself up to the care of her new protector with a confidence and self-possession which showed that she was quite used to the guardianship of strangers. As she descended from the car with a light bound, scarcely touching the hand held out for her support, a little traveling-satchel she carried on her arm flew open, and a small volume, elegantly bound, dropped upon the ground. The lieutenant picked it up.

“ Let me see what you have been reading,” he said, turning over the leaves. “Ah, it is all in French ; so you are a French scholar, ma petite f''

“ Yes ; everybody spoke French at St. Catherine’s.”

“A book of devotions, too,” he continued, casting his eyes over the pages ;

that looks very pious. Are you going to be a nun ?”

“ Oh, no, I am going to be a famous opera-singer,” was the naive rejoinder.

“An opera-singer I What does Father Perline say to that?”

“ He says I am too young to decide yet, but when I am grown, if'I will be very good, it may be that I can do my duty better by being a great and famous person than by becoming a nun. My father says I must be a nun, but I won^t.”

The words were spoken with an air of decision that indicated a very determined character, and at the mention of her father the child’s face assumed a bitterness of expression painful to behold in one of her years. The young officer wondered if a dim shadow of the suspicion that haunted him had ever crossed her youthful mind.

As he continued idly fingering the little volume in his hand, he chanced to turn over a fly-leaf at the beginning, on which was inscribed, in a precise female calligraphy, the child’s full name,

“Ruth Harfleur,”

with other words, to the effect that the little book had been presented as a reward of merit by the Mother Superior of St. Catherine’s Convent, Quebec, Canada.

“ So that is your name, is it?” said the lieutenant, reading the inscription aloud. “ Ruth Harfleur, — and a very pretty name it is, — French too.” And in this fact he seemed to perceive some possible explanation of the unnatural parent’s desire to have her reared in French convent schools ; but why New Orleans, rather than Quebec, just at this season ?•

The child herself was perplexed with none of these questions. She liked her new companion, and was gratified to hear him praise anything belonging to her.

“ Do you really like my name ?” she asked, looking up at him with a bright smile. “ I wonder if I should like yours too : is it a very pretty one?”

“ I don’t know whether you would think so,” he replied, “ but it is a name that all who bear it are very proud of. I will put it down here by yours, so that you can judge for yourself, and then, maybe, you will look at it sometimes, and think of me, when I am far away.” With that, he wrote something in pencil just below

Mother Isodora’s prim inscription, and returned the volume to Ruth, who read aloud,

“Audley Malvern,

“ Heath moor,

“ Virginia.”

“ Why, it sounds just as if it had come out of a novel !” cried the child, in a delighted voice. “ I like it a great deal better than my name.”

“ You do? I must bear that in mind,” said Malvern, smiling, “for who knows but I may some day propose to you to make the exchange? I’ve a propensity for falling in love with opera-singers, and you will make an uncommonly pretty one, Ruth. AVhen I get to be a colonel, and you are a grown-up young lady, I mean to come back and ask you to marry me. Will you have me, Ruth?”

“ I would if you were not a heretic,” was the innocent reply.

“Oh, as for that matter,” said Malvern, laughing, “it is true my family are all heretics, but I don’t think I have religion enough of any sort to be made a serious objection against me.”

Audley Malvern had just reached that age at which we feel disposed to be very patronizing towards people a few years younger than ourselves. At twenty-one he fancied himself quite a patriarch, in comparison with , a girl of thirteen, and Ruth’s convent training had caused her to retain so much of the freshness and simplicity of childhood, that she seemed to him almost a baby still. They were walking along on the railroad track, Audley keeping in the centre, and holding Ruth by the hand to support her while she amused herself by tripping along on the iron bars. They had gone about three-quarters of a mile from the place where they left the train, when they came to a low, moist spot, with a foot-path running through it parallel to the railroad. They descended into this path, where it was much more agreeable walking than on the dusty track beside it. They had not proceeded far, when Ruth suddenly releasM her companion’s hand, and darted forward, with an exclamation of delight, to pluck a solitary flower blooming by the wayside.

“See, see herel” she cried, triumphantly, displaying her treasure. “ It is just like the wild lilies I used to gather at home, when mammy took me walking on Sunday afternoons.”

“ Your mammy ?” cried Audley, catching at the word. “ I didn’t know you

MBS. BOTTOMS'S HOTEL, little Canadian children had mammies ; I thought you called them bonnes,"

Canadian I I’m no Canadian,” answered Euth, with the air of one resenting an injury. “I’m a Southerner: I was born in Georgia.”

“Indeed!” and the young officer regarded her with a look of fresh surprise.

“ Yes ; but I don’t know that I have any right to call it home now, for I have not been there in a long, long time, — not since I was a child.”

“And how long ago is that?” asked Audley, with a smile.

“ Five years,” she answered, in a tone of childish pathos. “ I was just eight years old when mamma died, and then father carried me away to Mr. Tadpole’s school, and I have never been home since. I cried very much when they sent me away. I was a child then, you know, and Uncle Bruen said there was no need to hurry about my education ; he thought I might wait a year or two at home, but father wouldn’t hear to it. I have always loved Uncle Bruen for that. He was very good to me when I was little, but I dare say he has forgotten me now, or maybe he is dead, for I have never heard from him since I left home, though I wrote him three letters without a blot, or a word spelt wrong in any one of them. Aunt Bruen sent me a Christmas-box once, but Mrs. Tadpole took it from me, because, she said, sweet things were not good for children. She used to give us cold bread and hominy with molasses for supper, and horrid old peach-pies for a treat on Saturdays. I hate pies, and I’m sure they can’t be good for children, because Annie Barrow’s mother had to take her home to keep her from dying of dis — pep — peps — some dreadful disease with a long, name, that Dr. Sharpe said came from eating the wrong things.”

“And you would have gone home too, I suppose, if they had let you?” said Malvern, amused at the child’s narrative. -

“That I would!” cried Euth, vehemently. “ It was a dreadful place, and Mr. Tadpole was worse even than his wife. He used to make us spend the whole of Sunday listening to sermons. We had to go to church twice a day, and at night he would read aloud out of horrid good books, and we were punished if we went to sleep.”

“You don’t seem to like sermons and good books,” said the young man, smiling.

“No, indeed 5 and the prayers were worse than the sermons. Whenever any of us did anything wrong, Old Slimy — we called him that, you know, because tadpoles are slimy — would put it down in his note-book, and pray for us by name the next Sunday at church. It’s dreadful to be prayed for: everybody turns round and looks at you ; and then I used to think Mr. Tadpole’s prayers were granted, too, because things were always happening to me there.”

“Were you punished often?” asked Audley.

“ Oh, yes ; we had to get lessons in the Catechism that long,” measuring an imaginary column with her fingers, “and to learn whole chapters in the Bible by heart. I used to be punished oftener than the other girls, because JEneas Tadpole was always doing things to make me angry. He was a big boy, two years older than I, and used to take my books from me, and rub out my sums after I had done them on my slate, and when I cried about it he would call me names. I didn’t mind that so much, but sometimes he would call my poor dead mamma names, and then I would say things, and he would run and tell his father tales ; then old Mr. Tadpole would come and lecture me, and tell me I was a child of Belial, and there was.no place in heaven for the like of me ; and then he would make prayers about me next morning before the whole school, and tell God how bad I was. One day ^neas made faces at me while his father was praying, and I flung my Bible at his head, and, oh, such a storm as there was then !”

“What did they do to you?” Audley inquired, highly amused.

“ Oh, all sorts of things. I was kept a week on bread and water, — that was a favorite punishment with Mrs. Tadpole ; because she saved by it, — and then I was prayed over, every Sunday, for a long time, and had to learn a whole chapter in the Bible by heart every day. Did you ever read the Bible? It’s a dreadful book.”

“ N — 0, I can’t say that I’ve ever read it enough to do me any harm,” said Malvern, with an honest blush at his own delinquency.

“ So, then, you didn’t go to a New England school when you were little!” cried the child, reassured by this creditable confession. “ They made me learn all Chronicles by heart at Bethel Seminary, and I was beginning on Deuteronomy when I went to St. Catherine’s.”

“ And how came you to go there?”

A FAMILY SECRET.

I got sick, with a dreadful cough, that used to keep me awake all night; and the doctors said that unless I went to a milder climate I couldn’t live long. Then father came, and I thought I was going home, but he carried me to Canada instead.”