The Guardian Angel

Front matter

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Contents

——— AN ADVERTISEMENT “ 3 ° ° . e GREAT EXCITEMENT . “ : 2 : ANTECEDENTS. . ° . ° 0 BYLEs GRIDLEY, A. M. . . “ : - THE TwINs . e . . : F 5 ° THE USE OF SPECTACLES . ° ° . ° MYRTLE’s LETTER. — THE YOUNG MEN’s PORSUIT DOWN THE RIVER . é 5 : . < ‘

Mr. CLEMENT LINDSAY RECEIVES A LETTER, AND

BEGINS HIS ANSWER. s A : Mr. CLEMENT LINDSAY FINISHES HIS LETTER. — WHAT CAME OF IT . - ; ° ° VEXED WITH A DEVIL : - : ; A

Chapter II. Great Excitement

HE publication of the advertisement in the paper brought the village fever of the last two days to its height. Myrtle Hazard’s disappearance had been pretty well talked round through the immediate neighborhood, but now that forty-eight hours of search and inquiry had not found her, and the alarm was so great that the young girl’s friends were willing to advertise her in a public journal, it was clear that the gravest apprehensions were felt and justified. The paper carried the tidings to many who had not heard it. Some of the farmers who had been busy all the week with their fields came into the village in their wagons on Saturday, and there first learned the news, and saw the paper, and the placards which were posted up, and listened, open-mouthed, to the whole story.

Saturday was therefore a day of much agitation in Oxbow Village, and some stir in the neighboring settlements. Of course there was a great variety of comment, its character depending very much on the sense, knowledge, and disposition of the citizens, gossips, and young people who alked over the painful and mysterious occurrence.

The Withers Homestead was naturally the chief centre of interest. Nurse Byloe, an ancient and voluminous woman, who had known the girl when she was a little brighteyed child, handed over “the baby” she was holding to another attendant, and got on her things to go straight up to The Poplars. She had been holding “the baby” these forty years and more, but somehow it never got to be more than a month or six weeks old. She reached The Peplars after much toil and travail. Mistress Fagan, Irish, houseservant, opened the door, at which Nurse Byloe knocked softly, as she was in the habit of doing at the doors of those who sent for her.

“Have you heerd anything yet, Kitty Fagan?” asked Nurse Byloe.

“ Niver a blissed word,” said she. “ Miss Withers is up stairs with Miss Bathsheby, a cryin’ and a lam-entin’. Miss Badlam’s in the parlor. The men has been draggin’ the pond. They have n’t found not one thing, but only jest two, and that was the old coffee-pot and the gray cat,— it’s them nigger boys hanged her with a string they tied round her neck and then drownded her.” [P. Fagan, Jr ZEt. 14, had a snarl of similar string in his pocket. ]

Mistress Fagan opened the door of the best parlor. A woman was sitting there alone, rocking back and forwa~d, and fanning he1;2!f with the blackest of black fans.

“Nuss Byloe, 1. ‘hat you? Well, to be sure, I’m giad to see you, though w~’re all in trouble. Set right de~wn, Nuss, do. O, its dreaaful times!”

A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emot*-aal overflow was here called on for its function.

Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab ¢ aair with one of those soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so fearfully like a very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as they flatten under the subs*ting “erson.

The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia tad tam, second-cousin of Miss Silence Withers, with whon she had been living as a companion at intervals for some years

She appeared to be thirty-five years old, more or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth, though of course she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often the case with women. She wore a not unbecoming cap; frequent headaches had thinned her locks somewhat of late years. Features a little too sharp, a keen, gray eye, a quick and restless glance, which rather avoided being met, gave the impression that she was a wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and, very possibly, crafty person.

“T could n’t help comin’,” said Nurse Byloe, “we do so love our babies, — how can we help it, Miss Badlam?”

The spinster colored up at the nurse’s odd way of using the possessive pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing such a speech.

“T never tended children as you have, Nuss,” she said. “But I’ve known Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think she should have come to such an end, — ‘ The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,’” — and.she wept.

“ Why, Cynthy Badlam, what do y’ mean?” said Nurse Byloe. “ Y’ don’t think anything dreadful has come o’ that child’s wild nater, do ye?”

“Child!” said Cynthia Badlam,—“child enough to wear this very gown I have got on and not find it too big for her neither.” [It would have pinched Myrtle here and there pretty shrewdly. ]

The two women looked each other in the eyes with subtle interchange of intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its specialty. Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it is all the conversation of the lower animals. Only the dull senses of men are dead to it as to the music of the spheres. 1*

Their minds travelled along, as if they had been yoked together, through whole fields of suggestive speculation, until the dumb growths of thought ripened in both their souls into articulate speech, — consentingly, as the movement comes after the long stillness of a Quaker meeting.

Their lips opened at the same moment. “You don’t mean” — began Nurse Byloe, but stopped as she heard Miss Badlam also speaking.

“They need n’t drag the pond,” she said. “They need n’t go beating the woods as if they were hunting a patridge, — though for that matter Myrtle Hazard was always more like a patridge than she was like a pullet. Nothing ever took hold of that girl, — not catechising, nor advising, nor punishing. It’s that dreadful will of hers never was broke. I’ve always been afraid that she would turn out a child of wrath. Did y’ ever watch her at meetin’ playing with posies and looking round all the time of the long prayer? ‘That’s what I’ve seen her do many and many a time. I’m afraid—O dear! Miss Byloe, I’m afraid to say what I’m afraid of. Men are so wicked, and young girls are full of deceit and so ready to listen to all sorts of artful creturs that take advantage of their ignorance and tender years.” She wept once more, this time with sobs that seemed irrepressible.

“Dear suz!” said the nurse, “I won’t believe no sech thing as wickedness about Myrtle Hazard. You mean she’s gone an’ run off with some good-for-nothin’ man or other? If that ain’t what y’ mean, what do y’ mean? Ii can’t be so, Miss Badlam: she’s one 0’ my babies. At any rate, I handled her when she fust come to this village — and none o’ my babies never did sech a thing. Fifteen year old, and be bringin’ a whole family into disgrace

{f she was thirty year old, or five-an’-thirty or more, and never ’d had a chance to be married, and if one o’ them artful creturs you was talkin’ of got hold of her, — then, to be sure, — why, dear me!—law! JI never thought, Miss Badlam!—but then of course you could have had your pickin’ and choosin’ in the time of it; and I don’t mean to say it’s too late now if you felt called that way, for you ’re better lookin’ now than some that’s younger, and there’s no accountin’ for tastes.”

A sort of hysteric twitching that went through the frame of Cynthia Badlam dimly suggested to the old nurse that she was not making her slightly indiscreet personality much better by her explanations. She stopped short, and surveyed the not uncomely person of the maiden lady sitting before her with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes, and one hand clenching the arm of the rocking-chair, as if some spasm had clamped it there. The nurse looked at her with a certain growing interest she had never felt before. It was the first fime for some years that she had had such a chance, partly because Miss Cynthia had often been away for long periods, — partly because she herself had been busy professionally. ‘There was no occasion for her services, of course, in the family at The Poplars; and she was always following round from place to place after that everlasting migratory six-weeks or less old baby.

There was not a more knowing pair of eyes, in their way, in a circle of fifty miles, than those kindly tranquil orbs that Nurse Byloe fixed on Cynthia Badlam. The silver threads in the side fold of hair, the delicate lines at the corner of the eye, the slight drawing down at the angle of the mouth, — almost imperceptible, but the nurse dwelt upon it,—a certain moulding of the features as of an artist’s clay model worked by delicate touches with the fingers, showing that time or pain or grief had had a hand in shaping them, the contours, the adjustment of every fold of the dress, the attitude, the very way of breathing, were all passed through the searching inspection of the ancieut expert, trained to know all the changes wrought by time and circumstance. It took not so long as it takes to deacribe it, but it was an analysis of imponderables, equal te any of Bunsen’s with the spectroscope.

Miss Badlam removed her handkerchief and looked in a furtive, questioning way, in her turn, upon the nurse.

“Tt’s dreadful close here,—I’m ’most smothered,” Nurse Byloe said; and, putting her hand to her throat, unclasped the catch of the necklace of gold beads she had worn since she was a baby,—a bead having been added from time to time as she thickened. It lay in a deep groove of her large neck, and had not troubled her in breathing before, since the day when her husband was run over by an ox-team.

At this moment Miss Silence Withers entered, followed by Bathsheba Stoker, daughter of Rey. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.

She was the friend of Myrtle, and had come to comfort Miss Silence, and consult with her as to what further search they should institute. The two, Myrtle’s aunt and her friend, were as unlike as they could well be. Silence Withers was something more than forty years old, a shadowy, pinched, sallow, dispirited, bloodless woman, with the habitual look of the people in the funeral carriage which follows next to the hearse, and the tone in apeaking that may be noticed in a household where one of ite members 1s lying white and still in a cool, darkened cham ber overhead. Bathsheba Stoker was not called handsome; but she had her mother’s youthful smile, which was as fresh and full of sweetness that she seemed like a beauty while she was speaking or listening; and she could never be plain so long as any expression gave life to her features. In perfect repose, her face, a little prematurely touched by sad experiences, —for she was but seventeen years old, —had the character and decision stamped in its outlines which any young man who wanted a companion to warn, to comfort, and command him, might have depended on as warranting the courage, the sympathy, and the sense demanded for such a responsibility. She had been trying her powers of consolation on Miss Silence. It was a sudden freak of Myrtle’s. She had gone off on some foolish but innocent excursion. Besides, she was a girl that would take care of herself; for she was afraid of nothing, and nimbler than any boy of her age, and almost as strong as any. As for thinking any bad thoughts about her, that was a shame; she cared for none of the young fellows that were round her. Cyprian Eveleth was the one she thought most of; but Cyprian was as true as his sister Olive, — and who else was there?

To all this Miss Silence answered only by sighing and moaning. For two whole days she had been kept in constant fear and worry, afraid every minute of some tragical message, perplexed by the conflicting advice of all manner of officious friends, sleepless of course through the two nights, and now utterly broken down snd collapsed.

Bathsheba had said all she could in the way of consolation, and hastened back to her mother’s bedside, which she hardly left, except for the briefest of visits.

4 THE GUABDIAN ANGEL.

“It’s a great trial, Miss Withers, that’s laid on you,” said Nurse Byloe.

“If I only knew that she was dead, and had died in the Lord,” Miss Silence answered, —“if I only knew that; but if she is living in sin, or dead in wrong-doing, what is to become of me? —O, what is to become of me when ‘He maketh inquisition for blood’?”

“Cousin Silence,” said Miss Cynthia, “it isn’t your fault, if that young girl has taken to evil ways. If going to meeting three times every Sabbath day, and knowing the catechism by heart, and reading of good books, and the best of daily advice, and all needful discipline, could have corrected her sinful nature, she would never have run away from a home where she enjoyed all these privileges. It’s that Indian blood, Cousin Silence. It’s a great mercy you and I have n’t got any of it in our veins! What can you expect of children that come from heathens and savages? You can’t lay it to yourself, Cousin Silence, if Myrtle Hazard goes wrong —”

“The Lord will lay it to me,—the Lord will lay it to me,” she moaned. “ Didn’t he say to Cain, ‘Where is Abel, thy brother ?’”

Nurse Byloe was getting very red in the face. She had had about enough of this talk between the two women. “I hope the Lord ’ll take care of Myrtle Hazard fust, if she’s in trouble, ’n’ wants help,” she said; “’n’ then look out for them that comes next. Y’ ’re too suspicious, Miss Badlam; y’ ’re too easy to believe stories. Myrtle Hazard was as pretty a child and as good a child as ever I see, if you did n’t rile her; ’n’ d’d y’ ever see one o’ them hearty lively children, that had n’t a sperrit of its own? For my part, I’d rather handle one of ’em than a dozen o’ them ittle waxy, weak-eyed, slim-necked creturs that always do what they tell ’em to, and die afore they’re a dozen year old; and never was the time when I’ve seen Myrtle Hazard, sence she was my baby, but what it ’s always been, ‘Good mornin’, Miss Byloe,’ and ‘How do you do, Miss Byloe? I’m so glad to see you.’ The handsomest young woman, too, as all the old folks will agree in tellin’ you, sence the time o’ Judith Pride that was, — the Pride of the County they used to call her, for her beauty. Her greatgrandma, y’ know, Miss Cynthy, married old King David Withers. What I want to know is, whether anything has been heerd, and jest what ’s been done about findin’ the poor thing. How d’ ye know she has n’t fell into the river? Have they fired cannon? They say that busts the gall of drownded folks, and makes the corpse rise. Have they looked in the woods everywhere? Don’t believe no wrong of nobody, not till y’ must, — least of all of them that come o’ the same folks, partly, and has lived with ye all their days. I tell y’, Myrtle Hazard’s jest as innocent of all what y’ ’ve been thinkin’ about,— bless the poor child; she ’s got a soul that’s as clean and sweet — well, as a pond-lily when it fust opens of a mornin’, without a speck on it no more than on the fust pond-lily God Almighty ever made!”

That gave a turn to the two women’s thoughts, and their handkerchiefs went up to their faces. Nurse Byloe turned her eyes quickly on Cynthia Badlam, and repeated her close inspection of every outline and every light and shadow in her figure. She did not announce any opinion as to the age or good looks or general aspect or special points of Miss Cynthia; but she made a sound which the books write humph/ but which real folks make with closed lips thus: m’/—a sort of half-suppressed labio-palato-nasal utterance, implying that there is a good deal which might be said, and all the vocal organs want to have a chance a it, if there is to be any talking.

Friends and neighbors were coming in and out; and the next person that came was the old minister, of whom, an of his colleague, the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, some account may here be introduced.

The Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton — Father Pemberton as brother ministers called him, Priest Pemberton as he was commonly styled by the country people — would have seemed very old, if the medical patriarch of the village had not been so much older. A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near theircamp. Dr. Hurlbut, at ninety-two, made Priest Pemberton seem comparatively little advanced ; but the college catalogue showed that he must be seventy-five years old, if, as we may suppose, he was twenty at the time of his graduation.

He was a man of noble presence always, and now, in the grandeur of his flowing silver hair and with the gray shaggy brows overhanging his serene and solemn eyes, with the slow gravity of motion and the measured dignity of speech which gave him the air of an old pontiff, he was an imposing personage to look upon, and could be awful, if the occasion demanded it. His creed was of the sternest: he was looked up to as a bulwark against all the laxities which threatened New England theology. But it was a creed rather of the study and of the pulpit than of every-day application among his neighbors. He dealt too much m the lofty abstractions which had always such fascinations for the higher class of New England divines, to busy himself as much as he might have done with the spiritual condition of individuals. He had also a good deal in him of what he used to call the Old Man, which, as he confessed, he had never succeeded in putting off, — meaning thereby certain qualities belonging to humanity, as much as the natural gifts of the dumb creatures belong to them, and tending to make a man beloved by his weak and erring fellow-mortals.

In the olden time he would have lived and died king of his parish, monarch, by Tivine right, as the noblest, grandest, wisest of all that made up the little nation within hearing of his meeting-house bell. But Young Calvinism has less reverence and more love of novelty than its forefathers. It wants change, and it loves young blood. Polyandry is getting to be the normal condition of the Church; and about the time a man is becoming a little over-ripe for the livelier human sentiments, he may be pretty sure the women are looking round to find him a colleague. In this way it was that the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker became the colleague of the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.

If one could have dived deep below all the Christian graces —the charity, the sweetness of disposition, the humility —of Father Pemberton, he would have found a small remnant of the “Old Man,” as the good clergyman would have called it, which was never in harmony with the Rev. Mr. Stoker. The younger divine felt his importance, and made his venerable colleague feel that he felt it. Father Pemberton had a fair chance at rainy Sundays and hot

ummer-afternoon services; but the junior pushed him atide without ceremony whenever he thought thero was B like to be a good show in the pews. As for those courtesies which the old need, to soften the sense of declining faculties and failing attractions, the younger pastor bestowed them in public, but was negligent of them, to say the least, when not on exhibition.

Good old Father Pemberton could not love this man but he would not hate him, and he never complained to him or of him. It would have been of no use if he had: the women of the parish had taken up the Rev. Mr. Stoker ; and when the women run after a minister or a doctor, what do the men signify ?

Why the women ran after him, some thought it was not hard to guess. He was not ill-looking, according to the village standard, parted his hair smoothly, tied his white cravat carefully, was fluent, plausible, had a gift in prayer, was considered eloquent, was fond of listening to their spiritual experiences, and had a sickly wife. This is what Byles Gridley said; but he was apt to be caustic at times.

Father Pemberton visited his people but rarely. Like Jonathan Edwards, like David Osgood, he felt his call te be to study-work, and was impatient of the egotisms and spiritual megrims, in listening to which, especially from the younger females of his flock, his colleague had won the hearts of so many of his parishioners. His presence had a wonderful effect in restoring the despondent Miss Silence to her equanimity; for not all the hard divinity he had preached for half a century had spoiled his kindly nature; und not the gentle Melanchthon himself, ready to welcome

cath as a refuge from the rage and bitterness of theologians, was more in contrast with the disputants with whom he mingled, than the old minister, in the hour of trial, with the stern dogmatist in his study, forging thunderbolts te smite down sinners.

Tt was well that there were no tithingmen about on that next day, Sunday; for it shone no Sabbath day for the young men within half a dozen miles of the village. They were out on Bear Hill the whole day, beating up the bushes as if for game, scaring old crows out of their ragged nests, and in one dark glen startling a fierce-eyed, growling, bob-tailed catamount, who sat spitting and looking all ready te spring at them, on the tall tree where he clung with his claws unsheathed, until a young fellow came up with a gun and shot him dead. They went through and through the swamp at Musquash Hollow; but found nothing better than a wicked old snapping-turtle, evil to behold, with his snaky head and alligator tail, but worse to meddle with, if his horny jaws were near enough to spring their man-trap on the curious experimenter. At Wood-End there were some Indians, ill-conditioned savages in a dirty tent, making baskets, the miracle of which was that they were so clean. They had seen a young lady answering the description, about a week ago. She had bought a basket. — Asked them if they had a canoe they wanted to sell. — Eyes like sers (pointing to a squaw with a man’s hat on).

At Pocasset the young men explored all the thick woods, —some who ought to have known better taking their guns, which made a talk, as one might well suppose it would. Hunting on a Sabbath day! They did n’t mean to shoot Myrtle Hazard, did they? it was keenly asked. A good many said it was all nonsense, and a mere excuse to get away from meeting and have a sort of frolic on pretence that it was a work of necessity and mercy, one or both.

While tley were scattering themselves about in this way, some in carnest, some rejoicing in the unwonted license, lifting off for a little while that enormous Sabbath-day pressure which weighs like forty atmospheres on every true-born Puritan, two young men had been since Friday in search of the lost girl, each following a clew of his own, and determined to find her if she was among the living.

Cyprian Eveleth made for the village of Mapleton, where his sister Olive was staying, trusting that, with her aid, he might get a clew to the mystery of Myrtle’s disappearance.

William Murray Bradshaw struck for a railroad train going to the great seaport, at a station where it stops for wood and water.

In the mean time, a third young man, Gifted Hopkins by name, son of the good woman already mentioned, sat down, with tears in his eyes, and wrote those touching stanzas, “‘The Lost Myrtle,’ which were printed in the next “Banner and Oracle,” and much admired by many who read them.

CHAP PHIL I: ANTECEDENTS.

HE Withers Homestead was the oldest mansion in town. It was built on the east bank of the river, a

little above the curve which gave the name to Oxbow Village. It stood on an elevation, its west gable close to the river’s edge, an old orchard and a small pond at the foot of the slope behind it, woods at the east, open to the south, with a great row of Lombardy poplars standing guard in front of the house. The Hon. Selah Withers, Esq., a descendant of one of the first colonists, built it for his own residence, in the early part of the last century. Deeply impressed with his importance in the order of things, he had chosen to place it a little removed from the cluster of smaller dwellings about the Oxbow; and with some vague fancy in his mind of the castles that overlook the Rhine and the Danube, he had selected this eminence on which to place his substantial gambrel-roofed dwelling-house. Long afterwards a bay-window, almost a little room of itself, had been thrown out of the second story on the west side, so that it looked directly down on the river running beneath it. The chamber, thus half suspended in the air, had been for years the special apartment of Myrtle Hazard ; and as the boys paddling about on the river would often catch glimpses, through the window, of the little girl dressed in the scarlet jacket she fancied in those days, one of them, Cyprian Eveleth had given it a name which beeame current among the young people, and indeed furnished to Gifted Hopkins the subject of one of his earliest poems, to wit, “The Fire-hang-bird’s Nest.”

If we would know anything about the persons now living at the Withers Homestead, or The Poplars, as it was more commonly called of late years, we must take a brief inventory of some of their vital antecedents. It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames. Nay, there is recorded an experience of one of the living persons mentioned in this narrative, — to be given in full in its proper place, — which, so far as it is received in evidence, tends to show that some, at least, who have long been dead, may enjoy a kind of secondary and imperfect, yet self-conscious life, in these bodily tenements which we are in the habit of considering exclusively our own. ‘There are many circumstances, familiar to common observers, which favor this belief to a certain extent. Thus, at one moment we detect the look, at another the tone of voice, at another some characteristic movement of this or that ancestor, in our relations or others. There are times when our friends do not act like themselves, but apparently in obedience to some other Jaw than that of their own proper nature. We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in. No less than eight distinct personalities are said to have coexisted in a single female mentioned by an ancient physician of unim~ peachable authority. In this light we may perhaps see the meaning of a sentence, from a work which will be repeatedly referred to in this narrative, viz.: “ This body in which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans ts not G private carriage, but an omnibus.”

The ancestry of the Withers family had counted a mar tyr to their faith before they were known as Puritans. The record was obscure in some points; but the portrait, marked “ Ann Holyoake, burned by ye bloudy Papists, afio 15 ..” (figures illegible), was still hanging against the panel over the fireplace in the west parlor at The Poplars. The following words were yet legible on the canvas : —

“ Thov hast made a couenant O Lord with mee and my children forever.”

The story had come down, that Ann Holyoake spoke these words in a prayer she offered up at the stake, after the fagots were kindled. There had always been a secret feeling in the family, that none of her descendants could finally fall from grace, in virtue of this solemn “ covenant.”