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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
1826
Document
A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text.
Text
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The Catholic Iroquois
A Few years since, a gentleman, on his way from Niagara to Montreal, arrived at Coteau du Lac. While the pilot, in conformity to the law, was obtaining a clearance for the lower province, the clouds, which had been all day threatening a storm, poured out their stores of thunder, lightning, and rain with such violence, that it was deemed most prudent to defer the conclusion of the voyage till the following day. The Boatmen’s Inn was the only place of refuge, and the stranger was at first glad of the shelter within it. But he was an amateur traveller, and gentlemen of that fastidious class do not patiently submit to inconveniences. The inn was thronged with a motley crew of Scotch and Irish emigrants - Canadians - and boatmen, besides loiterers from the vicinity, who were just reviving from the revels of the preceding night. The windows were obscured with smoke, and the walls tapestried with cobwebs. The millennium of spiders and flies seemed to have arrived, for myriads of this defenceless tribe buzzed fearlessly around the banners of their natural enemy, as if, inspired by the kindliness of my uncle Toby, he had said, “poor fly, this world is wide enough for thee and me.”
The old garments and hats that had been substituted for broken panes of glass, were blown in, and the rain pattered on the floor. Some of the doors hung by one hinge - others had no latches; some of the chairs were without bottoms, and some without legs
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-- the bed-rooms were unswept; the beds unmade; and in short, the whole establishment, as a celebrated field-preacher said of a very incommodious part of the other world, was “altogether inconvenient.”
The traveller, in hopes of winning the hostess’s good-will, and thereby securing a clean pair of sheets, inquired his way to the kitchen, where he found her surrounded by some half dozen juvenile warriors in a state of open hostility, far more terrible than the war of the elements. Having succeeded, by means of a liberal distribution of sugarplums, in procuring a temporary suspension of arms, he introduced himself to his hostess by some civil inquiries, in answer to which he ascertained that she was a New England woman, though unfortunately she possessed none of those faculties for getting along, which are supposed to be the birthright of every Yankee. She did express a regret that her children were deprived of “school and meeting privileges,” and entertained something of a puritanical aversion to her Catholic neighbours; but save these relics of local taste or prejudice, she retained none of the peculiarities of her native land. The gentleman was not long in discovering, that the unusual ingress of travellers reduced them all to the level of primitive equality, and that so far from the luxury of clean sheets, he must not hope for the exclusive possession of any.
On further inquiry he learned, that there was a French village at a short distance from the inn, and after waiting till the fury of the storm had abated, he sallied forth in quest of accommodation and adventure. He had not walked far, when his exploring eye fell on a creaking sign-board, on which was inscribed “Auberge et laugement.” But lodgment it would not afford our unfortunate traveller. Every apartment - every nook and corner was occupied by an English part, on their way to the Falls.
Politeness is
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an instinct in French, or if not an instinct, it is so interwoven in the texture of their character, that it remains a fast colour, when all other original distinction have faded. The Canadian peasant, though he retains nothing of the activity and ingenuity of his forefathers, salutes a stranger with an air of courtesy rarely seen in any other uneducated American. The landlord of the Auberge was an honourable exemplification of this remark. He politely told the stranger that he would have to conduct him to a farm-house, where he might obtain a clean room and a nice bed. The offer was gratefully accepted, and out traveller soon found himself comfortably established in a neat whitewashed cottage, in the midst of a peasant’s family, who were engaged in common rural occupations. The wants of his body being thus provided for, he resorted to the usual expedients to enliven the hours that must intervene before bed-time. He inquired of the master of the house how he provided for his family, and after learning that he lived, as his father and grandfather before him, by carrying the few products of his farm to Montreal, he turned to the matron, and asked her why her children were not taught English. “Ah!” she replied, :the English have done us too much wrong.” She then launched into a relation of her sufferings during the last war. She had, like honest Dogberry, “had her losses,” and found the usual consolation in recounting them. The militia had spoiled her of her flocks and herds, and des veaux – des moutons - des dindons - et des poulets, bled afresh in her sad tale. If her children were not taught English, one of them, the mother said had been sent to a boarding-school at the distance of twenty miles, and she could now read like any priest. Little Marie was summoned, and she read with a tolerable fluency from her school-book a collection of extracts from the Fathers, while her simple parents sat bending over her with their mouths wide open, and their eyes sparkling, and occasionally turn—
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ing on the stranger with an expression of wonder and delight, as if they would have said, “did you ever see any thing equal to that?”
The good-natured stranger listened and lavished his praises, and then, in hope of escaping from any further display of the child’s erudition, he offered to assist her elder sister, who was winding a skein of yarn. This proved a more amusing resource. The girl was pretty, and lively and showed by the upward inclination of the corners of her arch mouth, and flashes of her laughing eye that she could understand the compliments, and return the raillery of her assistant. The pretty Louise had been living at Seignorie with the madame, a rich widow - “si riche - si bonne,” she said, but “trop agée pour Monsieur, parce qu’elle a peut être trente ans; et d’ailleurs, elle n’est pas assez belle pour Monsieur.” Monsieur was a bachelor of forty years standing, and his vanity was touched by Louise’s adroit compliment. The skein slipped off his hands, Louise bent her head to arrange it, her fair round cheek was very near Monsieur’s lips, perhaps her mother thought too near, for she called to Louise to lay aside her yarn and prepare the tea, and after tea the pretty girl disappeared. Our traveller yawned for an hour or two over the only book the house afforded, Marie’s readings from St. Augustine and St. Chrysostom, and then begged to be shown to his bed. On entering his room, his attention was attracted to an antique, worm-eaten, travelling port-folio. It was made of morocco, and bound and clasped with silver, and, compared with the rude furniture of the humble apartment, it had quite an exotic air. He took it up and looked at the initials on the clasp. “That is a curious affair, said his landlord, “and older than you or I.”
“Something in that way,: replied the landlord
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“ there is a big letter in it which has been like so much blank paper to us, for we have never had a scholar in the family that could read it. I have thought to take it some day to Pére Martigné at the Cedars, but I shall let it rest till the next year when Marie - bless her ! will be able to read writing. ” The stranger said that if his landlord had no objection, he would try to read it. The old man’s eyes glistened - he unclasped the port-folio, took out the manuscript and put it into the stranger’s hands. “You are heartily welcome,” he said, “it would be best but an uncouth for Marie, for, as you see, the leaves are mouldy, and the ink has faded.”
The stranger’s zeal abated when he perceived the difficulty of the enterprise. “It is some old family record I imagine,” he said, unfolding it with an air of indifference.
“Heaven knows,” replied the landlord ; “I only know that it is no record of my family. “We have been but simple peasants from the beginning, and not a single line has been written about us, except what is on my grandfather’s grave-stone at the Cedars - God Bless him! I remember well as if it were yesterday, his sitting in that old oaken chair by the casements, and telling us all about his travels to the great western lakes, with one Bonchard, a young Frenchman, who was sent to our trading establishments - people did not go about the world then, as they do now-a-days, just to look at rapids and waterfalls.”
“Then this,” said the stranger, in the hope of at last obtaining a clue to the manuscript, “this I presume is some account of the journey?”
“Oh, no,” replied the old man. “Bonchard found this on the shore of Lake Huron, in a strange wild place - sit down, and I will tell you all I have heard my grandfather say about it; bless the good old man, he loved to talk of his journey.” And so did his grandson, and the stranger listened patiently to the fol-
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lowing particulars, which are only varied in language from the landlord’s narration.
It appeared that about the year 1700, young Bonchard and his attendants, on their return from Lake Superior, arrived on the shore of Lake Huron, near Saganaw Bay. From an eminence, they described an Indian Village, or, to use their descriptive designation, a “smoke.” Bonchard despatched his attendants with Seguin, his Indian guide, to the village, to obtain canoes to transport them over the lake, and in the mean time he sought for some place that might afford him shelter and repose. The shore was rocky and precipitous. Practice and experience had rendered Bonchard as agile and courageous as a Swiss Mountaineer, and he descended the precipice leaping from crag to crag as unconscious of an emotion of fear, as the wild bird that flapped her wings over him, and whose screeches alone broke the stillness of the solitude. Having attained the margin of the lake, he loitered along the water’s edge, till turning an angle of the rocks, he came to a spot which seemed to have been contrived by nature for a place of refuge. It was a little interval of ground in the form of an amphitheatre, nearly infolded by the rocks, which as they projected boldly into the lake at the extremities of the semi circle, looked as if their giant forms had been set there to defend this temple of nature. The ground was probably inundated after the easterly winds, for it was soft and marshy and among the ranks of weeds that covered it there were some aquatic flowers. The lake had once washed the base of the rocks here as elsewhere; they were worn perfectly smooth in some places, and in others broken and shelving. Bonchard was attracted by some gooseberries that had forced themselves through crevices in the rocks, and which seemed to form, with their purple berries and bright green leaves, a garland around the bald brow of the precipice. They are among the few indigenous fruits of the
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wilderness, and doubtless looked as tempting to Bonchard, as the most delicious fruits of the Hesperides would, in his own sunny valleys of France. In reconnoitering for the best mode of access to the fruit, he discovered a small cavity in the rock, that so much resembled a berth in a ship, as to appear to have been the joint work of nature and art. It had probably supplied the savage hunter or fisherman with a place of repose, for it was strewn with decayed leaves, so matted together as to form a luxurious couch for one accustomed for many months to sleeping on a blanket, spread on the bare ground. After possessing himself of the berries, Bonchard crept into the recess, and, (for there is companionship in water,) he forgot, for a while, the tangled forests, and the wide unbroken wilderness that interposed between him and his country.
He listened to the soft musical sounds of the light waves, as they broke on the shelving rock and reedy bank; and he gazed on the bright element which reflected the blue vault of heaven, and the fleecy summer cloud, till his sense became oblivious of this, their innocent and purest indulgence, and he sunk into a deep sleep, from which he was awakened by the dashing of oars.
Bonchard looked out upon the lake, and saw, approaching the shore, a canoe, in which were three Indians - a young man who rowed the canoe, an old man, and a maiden. They landed not far from him, and without observing him, turned towards the opposite extremity of the semicircle. The old man proceeded with a slow, measured steps and removing a sort of door, formed a flexible brush-wood and matting, (which Bonhard had not before noticed,) they entered an excavation in the rocks, deposited something which they had brought in their hands, prostrated themselves for a few moments, and then slowly returned to the canoe; and, as long as Bonchard could discern the bark, glancing like a water-fowl over the
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deep blue waters, he heard the sweet voice of the girl, accompanied at regular intervals by her companions, hymning, as he fancied, some explanation of their mute worship, for their expressive gestures, pointed first to the shore, and then to the skies.
As soon as the canoe disappeared, Bonchard crept out of his berth, and hastened to the cell. It proved to be a natural excavation, was high enough to admit a man of ordinary stature, and extended for several feet, when it contracted to a mere channel in the rocks. On one side, a little rivulet penetrated the arched roof, and fell in large crystal drops into a natural basin, which it had worn in the rock. In the centre of the cell there was a pyramidal heap of stones; on the top of the pile lay a breviary and santanne; and on the side of it ere arranged the votive offerings Bonchard had seen deposited there. He was proceeding to examine them, when he heard the shrill signal whistle of his guide: he sounded his horn in reply, and in a few moments Sequin descended the precipice, and was at his side. Bonchard told him what he had seen, and Sequin, after a moment’s reflection, said, “This must be the place of which I have so often heard our ancients speak- a good man died here. He was sent by the Great Spirit to teach our nation good things: and the Hurons yet keep many of his sayings in their hearts. They say he fasted all of his lifetime, and he should feast now, so they bring him provisions from their festivals. Let us see what offerings are these?” Sequin first took up a wreath of wild flowers and evergreens, interwoven- “this,” he said, “was a nuptial offering;” and he inferred, that the young people were newly married. Next was the calumet- “this,” said Sequin, “is an emblem of peace, an old man’s gift- and these,” he added, unrolling a skin that enveloped some ripe ears of Indian corn, “are the emblems of abundance; and the different occupations of a man and woman. The husband hunts the deer,
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--the wife cultivates the maize; and those,” he concluded, pointing to some fresh scalps, and smiling at Bonchard’s shuddering, “those are the emblems of victory.” Bonchard took up breviary, and as he opened it, a manuscript dropped from between its leaves-he eagerly seized, and was proceeding to examine it, when his guide pointed to the lengthening shadows on the lake, and informed him that the canoes were ready at the rising of the full moon. Bonchard was a good Catholic; and like all good Catholics, a good Christian. He reverenced all the saints in
the calendar; and he loved the memory of a good man, albeit never canonized. He crossed himself, and repeated a paternoster, and then followed his guide to the place of rendezvous. The manuscript he kept as a holy relic, and that which fell into the hands of our traveller at the cottage of the Canadian peasant, was a copy he had made to transmit to France. The original was written by Père Mésnard, (whose blessed memory had consecrated the cell on Lake Huron,) and contained the following particulars:
This holy man was educated at the seminary of St. Sulpice. The difficult and dangerous enterprise of propagating his religion among the savages of the western world, appears early to have taken possession of his imagination, and to have inspired him with the ardour of an apostle, and with the resolution of a martyr. He came to America under the auspices of Madame de Bouillon, who had, a few years before, founded the Hotel Dieu at Montreal. With her sanction and aid, he established himself at a little village of the Utawas, on the borders lake St. Louis, at the junction of the Utawa river and the St. Lawrence. His pious efforts won some of the savages to his religion, and to the habits of civilized life; and others he persuaded to bring their children to be trained in a yoke, which they could not bear themselves.
On one occasion, an Utawa chief appeared before
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Père Mésnard with two girls whom he had captured from the Iroquois - a fierce and powerful nation, most jealous of the encroachment of the French, and resolute to exclude from their territory the emissaries of the Catholic religion. The Utawa chief presented the children to the father, saying, “They are the daughters of my enemy, of Talasco, the mightiest chief of the Iroquois-the eagle of his tribe : he hates Christians - he calls them dogs-make his children Christian, and I shall be revenged.” This was the only revenge to which the good father would have been accessory. He adopted the girls in the name of the church and St. Joseph, to whom he dedicated them, intending that when they arrived at the suitable age to make voluntary vows, they should enrol themselves with the religieuses of the Hotel Dieu. They were baptized by the Christian names of Rosalie and Françoise. They lived in Père Mésnard’s cabin and were strictly trained to the prayers and penances of the church ; Rosalie was a natural devotee- the father had recorded surprising instances of her voluntary mortifications. When only twelve years old, she walked on the ice around an island, three miles in circumference, on her bare feet- she strewed her bed with thorns, and seared her forehead with a red hot iron, that she might, as
she said bear the mark of the “slave of Jesus.” The father magnifies the piety of Rosalie, with the exultation of a true son of the church, yet as a man, he appears to have felt far more tenderness for Françoise, whom he never names without some epithet, expressive of affection or pity. If Rosalie was like a sunflower, that lives but to pay homage to a single object, Francoise resembled a luxuriant plant, that shoots out its flowers on every side, and imparts the sweetness of its perfume to all who wander by. Père Mésnard says she could not pray all her time. She loved to roam in the woods; to sit gazing on the rapids, singing the wild native songs, for which the Iroquois are so much
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celebrated-she shunned all intercourse with the Utawas, because they were the enemies of her people. Père Mésnard complains that she often evaded her penances, but, he adds, she never failed in her benevolent duties.
On one occasion, when the father had gone to the Cedars on a religious errand, Françoise entered the cabin hastily- Rosalie was kneeling before a crucifix. She rose at her sister’s entrance, and asked her with an air of rebuke, where she had been sauntering? Françoise said she had been to the Sycamores, to get some plants to dye quills for Julie’s wedding moccasins.
“You think quite too much of weddings,” rescued Rosalie, “for one whose thoughts should all be upon a heavenly marriage.”
“I am not a nun yet,” said Françoise, “but oh! Rosalie, Rosalie, it was not of weddings I was thinking - as I came through the wood I heard voices whispering - our names were pronounced - not our Christian names, but those they called us by at Onnontagué.”
“You surely dared not stop to listen!” exclaimed her sister.
“I could not help it, Rosalie - it was our mother’s voice” - An approaching footstep at this moment startled both the girls. They looked out, and beheld their mother, Genanhatenna, close to them. Rosalie sunk down before the crucifix, Françoise sprang towards her mother in the ecstacy of a youthful and natural joy. Genanhatenna, after looking silently at her children for a few moments, spoke to them with all the energy of strong and irrepressible feeling. She entreated, she commanded them to return with her to their own people. Rosalie was cold and silent, but Françoise laid her head on her mother’s lap, and wept bitterly. Her resolution was shaken, till Genanhatenna arose to depart, and the moment of decision
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could not be deferred ; she then pressed the cross that hung at her neck to her lips, and said, “Mother, I have made a Christian vow, and must not break it.”
“Come with me then to the wood,” replied her mother ; “if we must part, let it be there - come quickly - the young chief Allewemi awaits me - he has ventured his life to attend me here. If the Utawas see him, their cowardly spirits will exult in a victory over a single man.”
“Do not go,” whispered Rosalie, “you are not safe beyond the call of our cabins.” Francoise’s feelings were in too excited a state to regard the caution, and and she followed her mother. When they reached the wood, Genanhatenna renewed her passionate entreaties. “Ah! Françoise,” she said, “they will shut you within stone walls, where you will never again breathe the fresh air - never hear the songs of birds, nor the dashing of waters. The Christian Utawas have slain your brothers - your father was the stateliest tree in our forests, but his branches are all lopped, or withered, and if you return not, he perishes without a single scion from his stock. alas! alas! I have borne sons and daughters, and I must die a childless mother.”
Françoise’s heart was touched - “I will- I will return with you mother,” she said, “only promise me that my father will suffer me to be a Christian.”
“That I cannot, Françoise,” replied Genanhatenna, “your father has sworn by the God Areouski,* [* The God of War] that no Christian shall live among the Iroquois.”
“Then, mother,” said Francoise, summoning all her resolution, “we must part- I am signed with this holy sign,” she crossed herself, “and the daughter of Talasco should no longer waver.”
“Is it so?” cried the mother, and starting back from Françoise’s offered embrace, she clapped her hands and shrieked in a voice that rung through the wood;
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the shriek was answered by a wild shout, and in a moment after Talasco and the young Allewemi rushed on them. “You are mine,” said Talasco, “in life and in death you are mine.” Resistance would have been in vain. Francoise was placed between the two Indians, and hurried forward. As the party issued from the wood, they were met by a company of Frenchmen, armed, and commanded by a young officer eager for adventure. He perceived, at a glance, Françoise’s European dress - knew she must be a captive, and determined to rescue her. He levelled his musket at Talasco ; Françoise sprang before her father, and shielded him with her own person, while she explained in French that he was her father. “Rescue me,” she said, “but spare him-do not detain him-the Utawas are his deadly foes- they will torture him to death, and I, his unhappy child, shall be the cause of all his misery.
Talasco said nothing. He had braced himself to the issue, whatever it might be, with savage fortitude. He disdained to sue for a life which it would have been his pride to resign without shuddering, and when the Frenchmen filed off to the right and left, and permitted him to pass, he moved forward without one look or word that indicated he was receiving a favour at their hands. His wife followed him. “Mother - one parting word,” said Françoise, in a voice of tender appeal.
“One word,” echoed Genanhatenna, pausing for an instant; “Yes, one word - Vengeance. The day of your father’s vengeance will come - I have heard the promise in the murmuring stream and in the rushing wind - it will come.”
Françoise bowed her head as if she had been smitten, grasped her rosary, and invoked her patron saint. The young officer, after a moment’s respectful silence, asked whither he should conduct her? “To Père Mésnard’s,” she said.
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“Père Mésnard’s,” reiterated the office. “Père Mésnard is my mother’s brother, and I was on my way to him when I was so fortunate as to meet you.”
The officer’s name was Eugene Brunon. He remained for some days at Sy. Louis. Rosalie was engrossed in severe religious duties, preparatory to her removal to the covent. She did not see the strangers, and she complained that Françoise no longer participated her devotions. Françoise pleaded that her time was occupied with arranging the hospitalities of their scanty household; but when she was released from this duty by the departure of Eugene, her spiritual taste did not revive. Eugene returned successful from the expedition on which he had been sent by the government; then for the first time, did Père Mésnard perceive some token of danger, that St. Joseph would lose his votary; and when he reminded Françoise that he had dedicated her to a religious life, she frankly confessed that she and Eugene had reciprocally plighted their faith. The good father reproved and remonstrated- and represented in the strongest colours, “the sin of taking the heart from the altar, and devoting it to an earthly love” - but Françoise answered that she could not be bound by vows she had not herself made. “Oh! Father,” she said, “let Rosalie be a nun and a saint - I can serve God in some other way.”
“And you may be called to do so in a way, my child,” replied the father with solemnity, “that you think not of.”
“And if I am,” said Françoise smiling, “I doubt not good father, that I shall feel the virtue of all your prayers and labours in my behalf.” This was the sportive reply of a light, unapprehensive heart, but it sunk deeply into the Father’s mind, and was indelibly fixed there by subsequent circumstances. A year passed on - Rosalie was numbered with the black nuns
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of the Hotel Dieu. Eugene paid frequent visits to St. Lous, and Père Mésnard, finding further opposition useless, himself administered the holy sacrament of marriage. Here the father pauses in his narrative, to eulogize the union of pure and loving hearts, and pronounces that, next to a religious consecration, this is most acceptable to God.
The wearisome winter of Canada was past - summer had come forth in her vigour, and clothed with her fresh green the woods and valleys of St. Louis; the full Utawa had thrown off its icy mantle, and proclaimed its freedom in a voice of gladness. Père Mésnard had been, according to his daily custom, to visit the huts of his little flock. He stopped before the crucifix which he had caused to be erected in the centre of the village - he looked about upon the fields prepared for summer crops - up on the fruit trees gay with herald blossoms - he saw the women and children busily at work in their little garden patches, and he raised his heart in devout thankfulness to God, who had permitted him to be the instrument of redeeming these poor savages from a suffering life. He cast his eye on the holy symbol before which he knelt, and saw, or fancied he saw, a shadow flit over it. He thought it was a passing cloud, but when he looked upward, he perceived the sky was cloudless, and then he knew full well it was a presage of coming evil. But when he entered his own cabin, the sight of Françoise dispelled his gloomy presentiments. “Her face,” he says, “was as clear and bright as the lake, when not a breath of wind was sweeping across it, and the clear sun shone upon it.” She had, with her simple skill, been ornamenting a scarf for Eugene. She held it up for Père Mésnard as he entered. “See father,” she said, “I have finished it, and I trust Eugene will never have a wound to soil it. Hark!” she added, “he will be here presently, I hear the chorus of his French boatmen swelling on the air.” The good Father would
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have said, “You think too much of Eugene, my child,” but he could not bear to check the full tide of her youthful happiness, and he only said with a simple, “When your bridal moon is in the wane, Françoise, I shall expect you to return to penances and prayers.” She did not heed him, for at that instant she caught a glimpse of her husband, and bounded away, fleet as a startled deer, to meet him. Père Mésnard observed them as they drew near the cabin. Eugene’s brow was contracted, and though it relaxed for a moment at the childish caresses of Françoise, it was evident from his hurried step and disturbed mein, that he feared some misfortune. He suffered Françoise to pass in before him, and, unobserved by her, beckoned to Père Mésnard. “Father,” he said, “there is danger near. An Iroquois captive was brought into Montreal yesterday, who confessed that some of his tribe were out on a secret expedition; I saw strange canoes moored in the cove at Cedar Island - you must instantly return with Françoise in my boat to Montreal.”
“What!” exclaimed the father, “think you that I will desert my poor lambs at the moment the wolves are coming upon them!”
“You cannot protect them, father,” replied Eugene.
“Then I will die with them.”
“Nay father,” urged Eugene, “be not so rash. Go - if not for your own sake, for my poor Françoise - what will become of her if we are slain? The Iroquois have sworn vengeance on her, and they are fierce and relentess as tigers. Go, I beseech you - every moment is winged with death. The boatmen are ordered to await you at the Grassy Point. Take your way through the maple wood - I will tell Françoise that Rosalie has sent for her - that I will join her to-morrow - any thing to hasten your departure.”
“Oh, my son - I cannot go - the true Shepherd will not leave his sheep.”
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The good father continued inexorable, and the only alternative was to acquaint Françoise, and persuade her to depart alone. She positively refused to go without her husband. Eugene represented to her that he should be for ever disgraced if he deserted a settlement under the protection of his government, at the moment of peril - “My life, Françoise,” he said, “I would lay down for you - but my honour is a trust for you - for my country - I must not part with it.” He changed his intreaties into commands.
“Oh, do not be angry with me,” said Françoise; “I will go, but I do not fear to die here with you.” She had scarcely uttered these words, when awful sounds broke on the air - “It was my father’s war-whoop,” she cried - “St. Joseph aid us! - we are lost.”
“Fly-fly, Françoise,” exclaimed Eugene- “To the maple wood before you are seen.”
Poor Françoise threw her arms around her husband - clung to him in one long, heart-breaking embrace, and then ran towards the wood. The terrible war-cry followed, and there mingled with it, as if shrilly whispered in the ear, “Vengeance - they day of your father’s vengeance will come.” She attained the wood, and mounted a sheltered eminence, from which she could look back upon the green valley. She stopped for an instant. The Iroquois canoes had shot out of the island cove, and were darting towards the St. Louis, like vultures, eager for they prey. The Utawas rushed from their huts, some armed with musket, others simply with bows arrows. Père Mésnard walked with a slow but assured step towards the crucifix, and having reached it, he knelt, seemingly insensible to the gathering storm, and as calm as at his usual vesper prayer. “Ah,” thought Françoise, “the first arrow will drink his life-blood.” Eugene was every where at the same instant - urging some forward, and repressing others; and in a few moments all were marshalled in battle array around the crucifix.
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The Iroquois had landed. Françoise forgot now her promise to her husband, forgot every thing in her intense interest in the issue of the contest. She saw Père Mésnard advance in front of his little host, and make a signal to Talasco. “Ah, holy Father,” she exclaimed, “thou knowest not the eagle of his tribe - thou speakest words of peace to the whirlwind.” Talasco drew his bow - Françoise sunk to her knees, “God of mercy shield him!” she cried. Père Mésnard fell pierced by the arrow - the Utawas were panic struck. In vain Eugene urged them forward - in vain he commanded them to discharge their muskets. All with the exception of five men turned and fled. Eugene seemed determined to sell his life as dearly as possible. The savages rushed on him and his brave companions with their knives and tomahawks. “He must die!” exclaimed Françoise; and instinctively she rushed from her concealment. A yell of triumph apprized her that her father’s band descried her - she faltered not - she saw her husband pressed on every side. “Oh, spare him - spare him!” she screamed - “he is not your enemy.” Her father darted a look at her - “A Frenchman! - a Christian!” he exclaimed, :and not my enemy!” and turned again to his work of death. Françoise rushed into the thickest of the fray - Eugene uttered a faint scream at the sight of her. He had fought like a blood hound while he believed he was redeeming moments for her flight; but when the hope of saving her forsook him, his arms dropped nerveless, and he fell to the ground. Françoise sunk down beside him - she locked her her arms around him, and laid her cheek to his. For one moment her savage foes fell back, and gazed on her in silence - there was a chord in their natures that vibrated to a devotedness which triumphed over fear of death; but their fierce passions were suspended only for a moment. Talasco raised his tomahawk - “Do not strike, father,” said Françoise, in a faint calm
[63]
voice, “he is dead.” “Then let him bear the death-scar,” replied the unrelenting savage, and with one stroke he clove her husband’s head asunder. One long loud shriek pealed on the air, and Françoise sunk into as utter unconsciousness as the mangled form she clasped. The work of destruction went on - the huts of the Utawas burned, and women and children in one indiscriminate slaughter.
The father relates that he was passed, wounded and disregarded, in the fury of the assault - that he remained in a state of insensibility till midnight, when he found himself lying by the crucifix with a cup of water, and an Indian cake beside him. He seems at a loss whether to impute this succour to his saint, or to some compassionate Iroquois. He languished for a long time in a state of debility, and when he recovered, finding every trace of cultivation obliterated from St. Louis, and the Utawas disposed to impute their defeat to the enervating effect of his peaceful doctrines - he determined to penetrate further into the wilderness; faithfully to sow the good seed, and to leave the harvest to the Lord of the field. In his pilgrimage he met with an Utawa girl who had been taken from St. Louis with Françoise, and who related him all that happened to his beloved disciple after her departure, till she arrived at Onnontagué, the chief village of the Iroquois.
For some days she remained in a state of torpor, and was borne on the shoulders of the Indians. Her father never spoke to her - never approached her, but her permitted Allewemi to render her every kindness. It was manifest that he intended to give his daughter to this young chieftain. When they arrived at Onnontagué, the tribe came out to meet them, apparelled in their garments of victory, consisting of beautiful skins and mantles of feathers, of the most brilliant colours. They all saluted Françoise, but she was as one deaf, and dumb, and blind. They sung their songs of greet-
[64]
ing and of triumph, and the deep voice of the old chief Talasco swelled the chorus. Françoise’s step did not falter, nor her cheek blench; her eyes were cast down, and her features had the fixedness of death. Once, indeed when she passed her mother’s hut, some tender recollection of her childhood seemed to move her spirit, for tears were seen to steal from beneath her eye-lids. The wild procession moved on to the green, a place appropriated in every Indian village to councils and sports. The Indians formed a circle around an oak tree - the ancients were seated - the young men stood respectfully without the circle. Talasco arose, and drawing from his bosom a roll, he cut a cord that bound it, and threw it on the ground - “Brothers and sons,” he said, “behold the scalps of the Christian Utawas! - their bodies are mouldering on the sands of St. Louis: thus perish all the enemies of the Iroquois. Brothers, behold my child - the last of the house of Talasco. I have uprooted her from the strange soil where our enemies had planted her; she shall be reset in the warmest valley of the Iroquois, if she marries the young chief Allewemi and abjures that sign,” and he touched with the point of his knife the crucifix that hung at Françoise’s neck. He paused for a moment; Françoise did not raise her eyes, and he added, in a voice of thunder, “hear me, child; if thou dost not again link thyself in the chain of thy people-if thou dost not abjure that badge of thy slavery to the Christian dogs, I will sacrifice thee- as I swore before I went forth to battle, I will sacrifice thee to the god Areouski - life and death are before thee -- speak.”
Françoise calmly arose, and sinking on her knees, she raised her eyes to Heaven, pressed the crucifix to her lips, and made the sign of the cross on her forehead. Talasco’s giant frame shook like a trembling child while he looked at her - for one brief moment the flood of natural affection rolled over his fierce passions, and he uttered a piercing cry as if a life-cord were severed; but after
[65]
one moment of agony, the sight of which made the old men’s head to shake, and young eyes to overflow with tears, he brandished his knife, and commanded the youths to prepare the funeral pile. A murmur arose among the old men.
“Nay, Talasco,” said one of them, “the tender sapling should not be so hastily condemned to the fire. Wait till the morning’s sun - suffer thy child to be conducted to Genanhatenna’s hut - the call of the mother bird may bring the wanderer back to the nest.”
Françoise turned impetuously towards her father, and clasping her hands she exclaimed, “Oh do not - do not send me to my mother - this only mercy I ask of you - I can bear any other torture - pierce me with those knives on which the blood of my husband is scarcely dry - consume me with your fires - I will not shrink from any torment - a Christian martyr can endure as firmly as the proudest captive of your tribe.”
“Ha!” exclaimed the old man, exultingly, “the pure blood on the Iroquois runs in her veins - prepare the pile - the shadows of this night shall cover her ashes.”
While the young men were obeying the command, Françoise beckoned to Allewemi. “You are a chieftain,” she said, “and have power - release that poor Utawas child from her captivity - send her to my sister Rosalie, and let her say to her, that if an earthly love once came between me and Heaven, the sin is expiated - I gave suffered more in a few hours - in a few moments, than all her sisterhood can suffer by long lives of penance. Let her say that in my extremity I denied not the cross, but died courageously.” Allewemi promised all she asked, and faithfully performed his promise.
A child of faith - a martyr does not perish without the ministry of celestial spirits. The expression of despair vanished from Françoise’s face. A supernatu-
[66]
ral joy beamed from her eyes, which were cast upwards - her spirit seemed eager to spring from its prison-house - she mounted the pile most cheerfully, and standing erect and undaunted, pressed the crucifix to her lips, and signed to her executioners to put fire to the wood. They stood motionless with the fire-brands in their hands. Françoise appeared to be a voluntary sacrifice, not a victim.
Her father was maddened by her victorious constancy. He leaped upon the pile, and tearing the crucifix from her hands, he drew his knife from his girdle, and made an incision on her breast in the form of a cross – “Behold!” he said, “the sign, thou lovest—the sign of thy league with thy father’s enemies—the sign that made thee deaf to the voice of thy kindred.”
“Thank thee, my father!” replied Francoise, with a triumphant smile; “I might have lost the cross thou hast taken from me, but this which thou hast given me, I shall bear even after death.”*
The pile was fired - the flames curled upwards; and the IROQUOIS MARTYR perished.
* This circumstance in the martyrdom of an Indian girl, is related by Charlevoix. [Sedgwick’s note]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Catholic Iroquois
Subject
The topic of the resource
Catholic missionaries on the Canadian colonial frontier; Native captivity, conversion.
Description
An account of the resource
The historical story of Pere Mesnard is combined with an account of a young Native captive who becomes a Catholic martyr.
Creator
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Catharine Maria Sedgwick
Source
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Tales and Sketches.
Publisher
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Carey, Lea, & Blanchard.
Date
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1835
Contributor
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D. Gussman
Relation
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First published in The Atlantic Souvenir, 72-103. Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & Lea, 1826. Also collected (with editorial changes) in Stories of American Life, vol. 3., edited by Mary Russell Mitford. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Atlantic Souvenir
Canada
captivity
Catholic
Catholicism
conversion
crucifix
French
Huron
inter-racial marriage
Iroquois
missionaries
Montreal
Utawa
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/4347/archive/files/9f5dab6a34f5297b8a7230a4916a07ee.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=squERpLskn8S4jUMHEh7MyjDZUB%7EGmhLXq65fZqeX6UgcI2Xd0aYSYXGHQObrz9i1r6npO58XLFEa2tjKZpkJWv-CZipslaORQSrgQlvrLwdXWItHTM%7EkkIq-pvndKPd0jCh8Yznan5hajsyNxBMDIKLCiAnG4NXehLFdofON309T6TXK4yYE7ii9TbOTphh5kdw4979J1gHCCciS4MDuXB5rkeYo-tq9x%7EkkvoXMyBVg-kEYqBsJvy12OQBimav7EWM3VtrHZFJWkoagEBQRAWeES7Qvi5b0nClVEB4rcTXVKBMMpryUf43l4ulwEZrvklyhC8tjMWa39dFS5ebnw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
f993435fae157841b6f55ff2f3841f64
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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1831
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories published in 1831.
Document
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Text
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BERKELEY JAIL.
By the Author of Hope Leslie.
None are all evil.
Byron.
The circumstances of the following story, though they transpired within the last thirty years, are already nearly forgotten, or are only accurately remembered by those who are passing into the ranks of the shadowy existence – ‘the oldest inhabitant,’ by whom they are transmitted in the prosing winter’s tale, to the thirsty ears of boys and girls. I have diligently collected the particulars, partly from the records of the judicial proceedings in Berkeley county, partly from tradition, and partly from memory – for the events formed an epoch in my quiet childhood, similar to that which might be made by an earthquake, an inundation, the eruption of a volcano, or any other interruption of the silent process of nature.
[14]
Within a township which I shall take the liberty to call Shelburne, stood, and still stands, a little removed from the village, and on the brow of a hill kindly sloping to the south, a mansion, which thirty years since was occupied by Colonel Vassal, and for almost a century preceding was in the possession of his ancestors. The projecting upper story marks the period of its erection to have been when Shelburne was a frontier settlement, and the houses were thus constructed to facilitate their defense against the Indians. It has the marked physiognomy of the pilgrim architecture – the upright roof, dormant windows, and door posts carved with hollyhocks and full blown roses, all as perpendicular and rectangular as the unbending proprietor of a century since. Its little antique court yard, with its scragged peach trees half hidden by overgrown lilac bushes – its superannuated damask rose bushes and high box borders, are quite enough to throw a modern horticulturist into a fever, but they were the pride and delight of Colonel Vassal. Beyond this boundary, nature, then and now, though now somewhat more adorned, smiles around the mansion in free unspoiled beauty. Elms of magnificent growth, the sugar maple with its masses of dense foliage, and mountain ashes with their palmy clusters of bright scarlet berries, indi-
[15]
cate the taste and refinement of the early proprietors; and the bright little stream, which winds and sparkles through the meadows that repose at the foot of the hill, seems to send up, from its wooded and fragrant banks, the homage of nature, a spontaneous tribute to the senses of its legitimate lord.
Colonel Vassal was a gentleman of the old school, and would have continued so, if he had lived to the present day of ‘don’t care’ and slipshod manners, for he had the essence of gentlemanliness in his spirit – delicacy, self-sacrifice, and an instinctive care of the feelings of every human being. He might have been a little overdoing and ennuyant in his courtesies, but the spirit went with the letter. The Colonel served in the French war, and the laurels he then won in the service of the mother country probably strengthened his ties to it, for his loyalty, though pure as gold, was not, when the revolutionary war broke out, found to be a transmutable metal, that could be fused into patriotism. To have opposed the current of what, in his honest judgment, the Colonel deemed rebellion, would at Shelburne have been madness, as well as folly. He therefore maintained a strict neutrality as to any overt acts, and gently floated down the troubled current of the times, now and then slightly molested by hot-headed partisans,
[16]
but generally protected by the sentiment which his strict honour, his kind-heartedness, and generosity could not fail to inspire.
His estate, however, suffered the common deterioration of property at the time, and unfortunately he was not bred to any business, nor gifted with that art which, in the language of the country, makes the most of a shilling. His keen neighbours would have ‘scorned to take the advantage’ of the Colonel’s uncalculating temper, but he was always sure to give it to them. Year after year his income was reduced and his capital abated, till, as was happily said by my friend in a similar case, ‘nobody could guess how his family was clothed and fed, but by supposing that the habit of eating, drinking, and wearing clothes was, like all other habits, when once fixed, not to be shaken off.’ This original solution of a common mystery did not entirely explain the enigma of the Colonel’s subsistence in his accustomed style. He had an old family servant who bore the nursery appellation of Mammy, and who was fully as devoted to the Colonel, in affection and effort, as Caleb, that prince and flower of servingmen, was to the master of Ravenswood, and far more ingenious in the arts of saving and twisting and twining, than any thing of mankind ever was or ever will be. The wants of Colonel
[17]
Vassal’s household were few; its numbers, alas! were reduced. Death had removed his wife, and child after child, till only one remained, Fanny Vassal, the last hope – the sweet and sufficient solace of her father. She was
‘The gentle and beautiful –
The child of grace and genius.’
There was a thriving young attorney in Shelburne by the name Levi Carter. He might have sat for the admirable picture of Gilbert Glossin, Esq. If he never committed equal atrocities, it was because a kind Providence saved him from equal temptation and convenient opportunity. He belonged to the large and detestable class of number one people, who think, hope, desire, plan and act only for themselves, and who are alone restrained, in the promotion of their interests, by the coarse fear of the law of the land. This man ‘fell in love’ – we use the current, much abused phrase – with Fanny Vassal. His wooing of course was the subject of village gossip, and the popular opinion went in favour of his success. A remarkable expression of dissent from this opinion from one Sam Whistler, an Indian game seller, was reported to Carter – “Miss Fanny marry Levi Carter!
[18]
when ye see the innocent lamb seek the company of the fox, and the pretty dove mate with the hawk, then ye’ll see Miss Fanny the wife of Levi Carter!” This speech happened to be repeated on the very morning after Carter received a decided negative from Miss Vassal, and a positive refusal from the Colonel, who was never positive before, to interpose his influence. As there is neither proportion nor distinctness in minds where there is no principle of truth or justice, Carter blended the miserable author of this petty offence, with the more dignified objects of his mean and malignant resentment. It was the first link in a chain that led to fatal consequences. Carter’s pretensions had passed and were forgotten by every one but himself, when the curiosity of the villagers of Shelburne was more powerfully exercised by the arrival of a nephew of Colonel Vassal, a captain in the corps of royal engineers, who was stationed somewhere in the wilds of Canada, and who, having obtained leave of absence for a winter to travel to the States, had come to Shelburne to pay his uncle a visit. It was no wonder to those who had seen, known and loved Fanny Vassal, that her cousin, having seen her, should grow indifferent about seeing any thing else in all our United States; nor was it a
[19]
marvel that after knowing the frank, warm-hearted and accomplished young soldier, she, like the gentle Miranda, should have
‘No ambition to see a goodlier man.’
Before the winter was over, with more love than prudence, they were united.
As Fanny could not or would not leave her father, it had been settled that Captain Vassal should return to Canada early in the spring, dispose of his commission, and come back to seek his fortune in the United States. He went, and, in attempting to cross one of the Canadian rivers on the ice, he was drowned. Poor Fanny! Her heart was too tender, and her love too concentrated to endure the shock. In a few months she was borne to the village church yard: but her memory lived; it lived in the increased kindness of the Colonel’s friends; in the patient grief written on his monumental face; in an infant boy; the memorial of her sufferings, and the heir of his mother’s wealth – the love of all that loved her.
As the infant expanded into boyhood, no eye but his grandfather’s and mammy’s could discern in him any resemblance to the blond beauty of his mother. His high bold forehead, black curling hair, bright restless eye lit with the fires of his ardent spirit, unfolded the dawn of a mind that promised a bright
[20]
futurity. He had nothing of the quiet acquiescent temperament of his old relative, but he had strong affections, and they were developed by his intercourse with him. He often put his little hands to the tasks of aiding his grandfather in cherishing a rose bush that had been planted by his mother. Everything else in the court yard grew in wild luxuriance, or died unheeded. This was pruned and watered and trained, as if instinct with her sweet spirit. His mother’s guitar hung beside the fireplace, and Charles would watch the old man has he leaned his head against it and his white lock fell over its broken strings, and silently creep into his lap and lay his head on his bosom, and this express the deep and almost mystical sympathy that united them, and which made him feel (to borrow the expression of the beautiful deaf mute, whose life has recently fallen a sacrifice to her filial tenderness) as if his heart grew close to his parent’s.
Time passed on, and has brought us, somewhat slowly, to Charles’s fourteenth year, and the incidents of the boy’s life which may indicate subsequent greatness. The same principle that stirs a feather impels a planet.
I must remind my readers, before exposing my young hero to the chastisements of a woman’s tongue,
[21]
that Mammy was of the privileged order of faithful old servants; that she had to strain every nerve to maintain a decent appearance and that she was often at her wit’s end, to keep the wheels of her little empire in motion.
It was Monday afternoon, and she had just put the last flourish on her well scoured and sanded kitchen floor, when Charles entered, with a string of game in one hand and a gun in the other, his shoes and pantaloons bearing ample tokens of his having been
‘Over hill, over dale
Thorough bush, thorough briar.’
He was followed by a lean, hungry dog, who, by keeping close to the heels of his principal and dropping his head and tail, indicated that he was aware of the fearful presence into which he had ventured. Mammy’s tongue always sounded as quick as an alarm bell; “What, under the canopy, Charles, does this mean? – stop, see how you are tracking the floor! your new pantaloons on too! Get out, you hound!” she continued, giving the expecting dog a blow with her broom-stick that sent him howling out of the house.
“Oh hush, Mammy,” replied Charles, in a deprecating
[22]
voice, “Sam is on the steps: here, Biter, here!” the dog bounded in again. “Now, Mammy, don’t scold, indeed I forgot to scrape my feet – there now,” he added, rising on his tiptoes, leaning over the old woman’s shoulder, and giving a hearty smack to her withered cheek – “there now, Mammy, we are friends again, are we not?”
An affectionate kiss is a panacea to old and young. The muscles of Mammy’s face relaxed, and her voice softened, as she replied, “Yes, Charlie, friends; but do drive out that nasty dog.”
“Excuse me, Mammy, I can’t; you must give him a bone, and draw a mug of cider for Sam.”
“A bone, child – high! the last bone in the house is as clean as the fatted calf’s; and a mug of cider for Sam, indeed! no, it is a shame and a sin to give cider to a drunken Indian.”
“Oh, hush, Mammy, hush, for pity’s sake. Look here – do you see these ducks? – elegant, are they not?”
“They are plump; they’ll do the Colonel’s heart good, poor old gentleman; he has had no more stomach for his victuals to-day than a teething baby.”
“Then remember, Mammy, we could not have got them but for Sam; and these partridges – beauties, as fat as butter – and four of them.”
[23]
“Did Sam kill them all?”
“No, indeed, I killed one; but the best of it all is, that as we were coming across the bridge we met Mr. Carter.”
“Did you? the black-hearted fellow!”
There was no neutral ground in Mammy’s mind for Mr. Carter; he never passed it without a shot.
“Well, he stopped and told Sam he had met him just in time; that he had company at his house, and wanted his game. ‘Turn round, Sam,’ said he, ‘and carry it to my house, and I’ll give you a dollar for it, and a glass of brandy into the bargain.’”
“What a shame to tempt the poor creater with brandy,” interrupted Mammy, with a most virtuous nod. “Well, what did Sam say, Charlie?”
“He shook his head.”
“Did he?”
“Yes, indeed! ‘Why you rascal,’ says Mr. Carter, ‘you don’t expect to get more than a dollar? well, well, I must have it, so go along with it, and I’ll give you a dollar and a half.’
“ ‘Squire,’ says Sam, looking up in his keen way, you know, Mammy – ‘Squire, all the money you have in the world can’t buy my game.’”
“Good, good!” exclaimed Mammy.
“ ‘What do you mean, fellow?’ says Mr. Carter.
[24]
‘I mean, Squire, to give the game to your betters – it’s for the Colonel.’ ”
“Well said, Whistler!” exclaimed Mammy, and setting down her broom, on which she had hitherto rested, she brought forth a bit of cold lamb which she had husbanded for the Colonel’s supper, cut it from the bone, which she threw to Biter, called Sam into her kitchen, set him down to her freshly scoured table, and in spite of her high principles, that a moment before had been stern enough for the head of a ‘Temperance Society,’ she filled and twice refilled the mug with cider.
Sam, or Sam Whistler (for Sam, as well as Cicero, had his descriptive cognomen), was a full-blooded Indian, I believe of the Seneca tribe. How he came to be a lopped branch from the parent tree was not known; the only soil he loved or honoured was that in which it grew. Accident probably threw him in his childhood among the whites, and the chains with which habit binds, even the most lawless, kept him there. But though in the heart of a civilized community, he adopted none of its usages. His tall and finely moulded figure was habited in a half savage costume. His crownless and almost brimless hat was banded with the skin of a rattlesnake, and trophied with the plumage of his last game. His outer garment
[25]
was a demi-coat, demi-blanket, fastened at the waist with a wampum belt, and his feet (when shod at all) were shod with a motley article compounded of moccasin and shoe. His home was a hut far in the depths of a wood that supplied the town of Shelburne with fuel. This hut was the resort of all those outlaws and vagrants that hand on the skirts of civilized society, as birds of prey hover over a cultivated land. Whistler honoured by observance the conjugal notions of his people, and, in the number and succession of his wives, his establishment rivalled the wigwam of a western chief. For the rest, he had the common vices so generously communicated by the whites to the vanishing race, in exchange for their broad lands and bright streams. He sustained his numerous consumers by hunting, fishing, basket and broom making, and such other little arts as did not, in his estimation, degrade him to the level of civilization. Towards the whites he had the sense of wrong that pervades his people,
‘And though the voice of wrath a sacred call
To pay the injuries of some on all.’
The Colonel and his little household were among the few exceptions to this deep-seated and cherished sentiment. The Colonel was a magistrate, but he had not one spark of the Brutus in his kindly nature, and, as his more astute neighbours thought, he
[26]
had often been culpably remiss in suffering Whistler’s petty offenses to pass without judicial investigation. Whistler felt his obligation to the Colonel’s long suffering, and besides, he gratefully remembered that Miss Fanny, always generous and pitiful, had, during a rigorous winter, sent provisions and blankets to his wives, subjects far without the pale of the charities of the good matrons of Shelburne. Whistler never forgot this kindness, and he returned it in many a tribute from flood and field to the Colonel’s table, and in instructing Charles, or, as he called him, his young ‘Eagle of Delight,’ in all the mysteries of fishing and woodcraft, so that before the boy was twelve years old, he knew the haunts of the game, and the lurking places of the trout, the shyest of the finny race, better than the oldest sportsman in the country.
Whistler’s lasting and effective gratitude was one of the lights that relieved the dark shadows of his character. There was another – a feeling of innate and indestructible superiority, which at times imparted dignity to his expressions and loftiness to his bearing, when there seemed to come from his soul revelations of a noble origin and high destiny, and he forgot himself and almost made others forget his actual squalid condition.
Carter, by all legal shifts, by
[27]
buying up notes and bonds and mortgages, acquired, at a cheap rate, a title to Colonel Vassal’s landed property, and claims beyond to a considerable amount. On the day following his encounter with Whistler, and, as was afterwards adjudged at all the tea-tables and lounging-places in Shelburne, impelled by the sting his pride then received – it is the last drop that makes the cup run over – he sent a deputy sheriff to Colonel Vassal’s with a writ, commanding the officer in the usual form ‘to attach the real and personal estate of the defendant, and for want thereof to take his body.’ He probably expected that the Colonel would apply to his neighbours for bail, and he well knew they would not permit the venerable old man to suffer the indignity of being put within the limits of the county jail, which was eight miles distant from Shelburne. But the Colonel was now broken down by age and infirmities, the habit of his mind was passive submission, and he thought nothing but literal compliance with the requisitions of the law. He seemed stunned and bewildered, but he betrayed no emotion. Once, indeed, he asked for Charles, and on being told that he was gone to the next village, he muttered, “Thank God – poor boy!” He seemed quite deaf to the cries and remonstrances of Mammy, who treated
[28]
the sheriff, who most unwillingly executed his office, as if he were a highway robber. There was a strange mixture of consciousness and inanity in the Colonel’s preparations to accompany the sheriff. He took down poor Fanny’s guitar, blew the dust away that had settled under the chords, and passed his trembling fingers over them. Alas! the resemblance of its unmeaning and discordant sounds to that nicer instrument which seemed suddenly to have been crushed, struck even Mammy’s coarse perceptions. “It’s as shattered as his mind,” she murmured. “Take it, Mammy,” he said, “and put it in your chest,” and turning to the sheriff he added with a faint smile, “I believe it would be of no use to Mr. Carter, it would not sell.” He then combed down his thin gray hairs in his customary way before putting on his hat, and said, in his usual manner, “Farewell, Mammy; take care of my boy, and look after every thing, and mind and tell David to put Lightfoot in the chaise and come for me before dark.” It was already nearly dark, and a cold October evening. David, an old family servant, had been dead many a year, and Lightfoot and the old chaise, long, long before, had passed into other hands, and Mammy, as she listened to these senseless orders, wept aloud. “Oh, it’s broke him all to pieces!”
[29]
she exclaimed: “it will kill him, I’m sure of it!” She was right. A predisposition to paralysis, combining with the effect of the shock and the unwonted exposure to the evening air, proved fatal, and before the next morning the good old man was released from his accumulated burden of age and grief. His body was brought back to his home, and the good people of Shelburne assembled, almost en masse, to testify their respect for his innocent life and sympathy for his sad death. Carter knew too well how to play his part, to be absent from this assembly, though when he met glances from of detestation from many an eye, and his ears caught but half-suppressed curses from many lips, he felt that there were sharper punishments than the laws can inflict. Then, as now, in many New England villages, the office of bearer retained its original import, and was no sinecure. Hearses were an unknown luxury. The young and the vigorous preceded the coffin, and alternately bore it on their shoulders. The procession was formed, Mammy and Charles walking next the body. Their honest grief neither feared observation, nor thought of it. Charles forgot that it was not manly to cry, and Mammy forgot every thing, but that she was following to the grave the beloved old master in whose service her hair had grown gray.
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Not far from them, and parallel to the line of the procession stalked along Sam Whistler, followed by his dog Biter. It was the first time he had ever been seen participating in any ceremony or usage of the villagers, and their feelings were touched by this extraordinary tribute to the Colonel’s memory. It was evident that Whistler felt the awkwardness of his conspicuous and novel position; he sometimes bounded forward, in a sort of Indian half trot, to the head of the procession, then fell back to the rear, but for the most part he was near Charles, and it was manifest that the living divided with the dead the honour of his presence. The procession halted. The bearers were to be changed, and Carter advanced with others to assure his portion of the burden. He had just raised his hands to transfer the coffin to his shoulder, when Whistler sprang forward, pushed him aside, and placing his own shoulder under the coffin, muttered, “The murderer touch the murdered? – no! no!”
Carter was compelled to submit to the indignity; altercation would only have rendered his dishonour more glaring, and he slunk back, angry and mortified, to his former station.
Death in this instance, as in others, did one of its appointed offices; it awakened active kindness for the
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bereaved. A friend of Colonel Vassal, soon after his death, procured a midshipman’s commission for Charles, and Mammy found a happy home, having in her own energies the abundant means of independence.
As may be supposed, Carter did not forget the humiliation he had endured on the day of the funeral. His mind was like bad liquor which has no purifying principle, and never works itself clear. He wreaked his resentment upon Sam by every species of legal annoyance, and it must be confessed that the poor outlaw afforded him opportunities for frequent inflictions, within the letter of the law. Sam, for the most part, nourished his resentment in silence, but once or twice he had been betrayed into saying, that “the Squire had best take care, or he would have the worst of it.” Hostilities had been growing more serious for some weeks, and Carter, to whom Sam’s threats had been reported, began to feel some forebodings of Indian revenge, that suggested to him the policy of driving him away. Accordingly he seized upon Sam’s next offence as a pretext, and availing himself of some obsolete puritanical by-law, he sent a constable to Sam’s forest-hut to warn him, as a public nuisance, to leave the town of Shelburne within twelve hours; in case of his failure to obey the mandate,
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his hut would be pulled down over his head, and burnt to the ground. It happened that when this mandate arrived, Whistler had just procured an unusual quantity of spirits for a vigil, which was to be kept on the occasion of the burial of an infant child. The grave was not far from the hut, and a panic just then pervading the country about the ‘resurrection men,’ Sam, with a guest, one Ira, a mulatto, had determined to secure the safety of the little defunct. As soon as the man of the law had performed his duty and departed, the women (always ‘tim’rous beastie’) counselled a temporary removal. Ira, too, who was a bird of passage that deemed a perch on one bough just as good as another, advocated the policy of a retreat. Whistler heard them through, and then, after taking a deep draught from his jug, said, “Ye may all go, like scared pigeons; I’ll not budge a foot – ‘pull down my hut!’ – what care I? Let them that live under broad roofs and sleep on soft beds fear. Carter, and all his race to back him, can’t harm me. Let them strike down the poles that shelter us; there are more in the forest; and if there were not, do I fear to lay my head on the bare-ground? – the earth is my mother. Do I fear the storms? – they are kinder than those that have driven my people beyond the great waters No, no; ye may all go, but I will not move while one clod of
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earth is here for my foot to stand upon. If the fire on my hearth-stone is put out, Carter shall repent it.”
Whistler’s resolution, as is often the case when a resolution is found to be immovable, was applauded. The women opened their steaming cauldron. The rude but savoury supper was served. The jug was freely passed. Whistler’s thirst was made insatiate by his roused passions, and the next day when Carter’s emissaries arrived on the spot, they found him laying across his child’s grave, in a state of brutal intoxication. Ira was near him, not quite unconscious, though his brain was completely muddled. The women had prudently absconded with their children. The hut, then, according to the legal warrant, was raised to the ground, and fire set to the dry poles.
On the same day Carter went out, as usual, to take his afternoon walk. He stopped on a little eminence that overlooked the long tract of wood that skirted Shelburne on the eastern side, and in whose depths Whistler’s hut had been sheltered. It was a cloudless, finely tempered summer’s afternoon. The air was freighted with the fragrance of the coming evening. The shadows were stealing over hill and valley, leaving here and there bright patches of sunshine. The matrons were sitting at their doors in
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their clean caps and calicoes, with their infant broods about them. The farmers were driving home their last creaking loads from their rich meadows. Little rustics were hieing to the village with their baskets of wild berries, and the happy boys were whistling home from pasture after their cows. But it was not this sweet picture of ‘country contentments’ that arrested Carter’s eye, or touched his sordid spirit. He had paused on that eminence to gaze on the light blue smoke that rose from the ruins of poor Whistler’s dwelling, and curled over the wood as if some instinct made it linger there. It was a feeling, as paltry as malignant, that made him exult in a triumph over such an enemy. Had he been at that moment inspired with one hour’s prescience, how would his exultation have been changed to fear and dread and horror. In one hour his body was found on that spot a reeking corpse. A cap identified as Ira’s, and Whistler’s well known basket were found near him, and suspicion, or rather belief, immediately fixed on these persons as the perpetrators of the crime; and though there might have been some who, in their secret souls, thought Carter had not suffered very far beyond his deserts, yet murder excites a universal sentiment of horror and desire of retribution, and all united in a vigorous pursuit of the supposed offenders. They were found
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together and both taken, and, before the close of the following day, were lodged in Berkeley county jail.
Ira appeared, like common criminals, eager for life, and anxious to obtain the best counsel. He denied in public, and to his lawyer in private, any participation in the murder of Carter. He denied also any knowledge of the means by which he came to his death. He did not intimate any suspicion of Whistler, but he asserted that they were separated during the afternoon of the murder, and he accounted plausibly for their being found together the next day. After some faltering he said, in explanation of his cap being found near the body, that it fitted Sam as well as it did himself, leaving it to be understood, without saying so, that the cap had been worn by Sam.
Whistler neither confessed nor denied the fact of the murder. When examined before the officers of justice he reserved a dogged silence, excepting repeated expressions of exulting, savage satisfaction in Carter’s death. When asked to select counsel for his trial, he refused, saying, “He knew no right white people had to try him, and if they would do it, they might have it all their own way.” Counsel was then assigned him by the court, and to the gentleman who undertook the hopeless task of defending him, he preserved the same obstinate silence and indifference.
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The prisoners were confined in the same cell, and it was observed that Ira was sycophantic in his devotion to Whistler, while Whistler treated him with a kind of churlish contempt. Ira was like one under the influence of strong fear, watchful of every word and motion, strictly decorous and respectful; while Whistler showed no other feeling than that yawning, snarling weariness which a wild animal manifests when imprisoned in a cage.
Ira was first put on trial. It was proved that Carter had come to his death by a single discharge of one gun, and Ira was acquitted. After the verdict was pronounced, he seemed mainly anxious not to be reconducted to Whistler’s cell for a moment, and nervously fearful of again seeing him.
When this was reported to Whistler, he laughed scornfully, shook his head, and said, “Ira is half white.”
When Whistler was put to the bar and asked the usual question, ‘guilty or not guilty?’ he rose, stretched out his arm and answered, “I’m glad he’s killed; if that’s being guilty, make the most on’t.” No other answer could be obtained from him. The trial proceeded. The impression of his guilt was so fixed, that scarcely any testimony could have saved him, and there was none in his favour. All the
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circumstances of his long existing feud with Carter were remembered and related; his repeated threats of vengeance, and various other unfavorable particulars, which the ingenious reader will recollect. As if to remove the least shadow of doubt of his guilt, a prisoner, who had been in the same cell with Ira and Whistler, testified that he heard Sam say, in a low emphatic whisper, to Ira’s wife (who had been permitted to visit her husband), ‘I killed him.’
The jury, without leaving their box, gave their verdict of guilty. Some said the prisoner was asleep when it was pronounced. It was certain that his eyes were closed, and that there was not on his countenance the slightest indication of sensation.
When asked by the court if he knew any reason why sentence of death should not be pronounced on him, he started, and asked fiercely, “What good would it do me if I did? No! no! I have but one thing to say – send for one of my own people to hang me; I want no white fingers to make a button of my neck.”
All were shocked at the poor wretch’s obduracy, but there were many persons of the neighbourhood who had known him a great while, and had kindly feeling towards him. Making allowance for the provocations he had received, for the habits of his life, and for the principle of revenge which
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he considered virtue, they would have rejoiced in his pardon. One of these persons, a man respected through the country for his wisdom, as well as humanity, told Sam that he would head a petition to the governor for his life. “Thank ye, thank ye kindly,” replied Whistler, for the first time softened; “but I don’t wish it; they have carried matters so far now, I would not take a pardon from them.” The project was therefore abandoned.
There was one individual that, like the Duke of Argyle’s follower who prayed ‘the Lord stand by our side right or wrong,’ hoped from the first to the last that Whistler, guilty or not guilty, would get clear. This individual was our friend Mammy; but her feelings as well as some important circumstances, will be best conveyed in her own simple language, in a letter addressed to Charles Vassal.
‘To Mr. Charles Vassal Midshipman on board the United States Ship -----.
‘My dear Charlie: – These few lines, you will know, come from your old Mammy, though, owing to my failing sight, I cannot write so straight and sightly as formerly.
‘I trust these will find you safe returned from the East or West Indies – which is it? I know they are different places, though I never can remember
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which is which. I enjoy but poor health lately, partly owing to worrying about Whistler. I can’t forget his trouble was ’casioned by his friendship for our family (Mammy always identified herself with the Vassal family), and it seems, Charles, it does, as if every thing that tried to prop up the old stricken tree was blasted. It is now two months since I wrote you about the trial, and his last day draws nigh, being one fortnight from next Friday. Poor Whistler! he has some bright spots in his heart – some places where you may say the sun breaks through the clouds; witness his often kindness to the Colonel, his love for you, Charlie, and his lifting the sods after your poor mother was buried, to lay a pair of moccasons on the coffin. It was an Indian notion, but did not it betoken a kind o’ human feeling? Well, I have done what I could to make the time pass away for him, and if I had done wrong, the Lord forgive me. You well know Charlie, I am an enemy to all spirituous liquor, and neither take it, nor willingly give it to others; but poor Whistler! Lord sakes it’s Indian natur! It was solitary for him, that was used to roaming the sweet wild woods, to be shut up in a stench cell! He needed the comfort and forgetfulness of it; and as to preparing for eternity, I’m sure I wish for it as much as the members can; but la me! he’ll never
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do that in a reg’lar way. He does not care one straw for all the minister says, but he has some soaring thoughts of his own – religious I don’t dare to call them, though it does seem as if the Almighty had breathed them into his soul – where else could he get them, Charlie? – he an Indian – and the life he has led.’
Mammy’s letter was broken off, and the remainder bore the date of the following day.
‘Since writing the above, dear Charlie, I had a chance to go to see Whistler, and thinking he might have some message to you, I left my letter till I came back – it was well I did! He was glad to see me, and soon asked the jailor to leave us alone together. I told him your ship was daily expected. You remember the low deep sound he makes when any thing touches his heart-spring; twice he repeated it, then patted Biter – they have let his dog stay with him – then he looked up in my face and said, in the softest voice I ever heard from him, ‘I would die content if I could see him once more – if he would but come and stand by me at the last.’
“Ah!’ said I, “Charlie’s stout-hearted, but so pitiful, I misdoubt he could not bear it.’
“Ogh!’ said he, ‘I am sure he can stand it, if I can live through it.’ I smiled, and he said scornfully, ‘Do you think it’s the death struggle I speak of? – no, I fear not that; but to have my hands tied behind me, and to be stared and gaped at, like a caged bear, by the troops of men, and women too – shame to them.’
‘And now, Charles, I have that to tell you that will make you both glad and sorrowful; and I would not tell it till the last, least my hand should be too much shaken to write the above. Whistler said to me,
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‘Do you think it would be a pleasure to the boy to believe I did not kill Carter?’ ‘Lord sakes, yes,’ says I, ‘indeed would it.’ Then he made me lift up my hand, as they do in court, and swear not to tell to any one but you what he should say. Then, Charlie, he laughed out and said, ‘I no more killed Carter than you did, mammy.’ I cannot repeat his exact words, but it seems that after the hut was burnt, and Sam came a little to himself, Ira would have persuaded him to go off, but he would not move, and then Ira said he would take his gun and Sam’s basket, and shoot some game to sell in the village for liquor. Neither of their heads was yet clear from what they had taken. Well, as Ira was on his way to the village he met Carter; some high words passed between them; Carter struck Ira with his cane, and Ira mad, and his brain still muddy, instantly discharged his gun into the poor
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creatur. ‘I asked Sam, why he had not told this before.’ ‘Why should I?’ said he: ‘it was me that Carter wronged, not Ira; it was I that hated Carter, not Ira; it was I that shouted when heard he was killed, not Ira. No, no, I was the murderer here,’ he said, knocking on his breast, ‘and if either must die for it, it should be me.’ Now don’t this remind you of St. Paul’s words, ‘the Gentiles having not a law are a law unto themselves?’ I asked him if it were true that he had said, ‘I killed him?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but who was it to, and what did it mean? Ira’s wife came to our cell, and begged him to turn state’s evidence against me. She made me mad, and I told her I killed him. She well knew what I meant for she always called Ira I!’
‘Now you see, dear Charles, how the whole matter stands, and I pray the Lord speed my letter and to bring you here in due time for the awful day. Yours, till death.
‘Mammy – otherwise ZILPAH THRIFT.’
Mammy’s prayers, seconded by a well appointed mail establishment, were effectual. Charles received her letter in due time, and using all diligence arrived at the shire-town of Berkeley county on the night preceding the day appointed for Whistler’s execution. Mammy was already there, and, firm in the faith of
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her favourite’s arrival, she had engaged rooms for him and for herself in the tavern, which was an appendage to the jail, and, kept by the jailor, was already thronged by the county people, who had flocked in to be in readiness for the rare and favourite spectacle of a public execution.
How strong and scared are the ties knit in childhood! They strained over Charles’s heart as he threw his arms around Mammy, and hugged the faithful old creature to his bosom, with the fond feeling of his earliest years. His grandfather – the home of his childhood – all its pleasures, never to be repeated rose to his recollection. Mammy suffered her rising feelings to overflow in words, and after wiping her eyes and clearing her voice, “Ha, Charlie, how you are grown? She said; “taller than I! – and goodness me! handsomer than ever.” Then passing her hand over his midshipman’s coat, “It beats the world – why you look like a reg’lar.” Then espying his dirk, “You don’t wear this all the time? – a’nt you afraid you’ll run it into somebody? – ha! how nat-ral that smile is! – Oh if the Colonel could have lived to see you! – Poor Whistler, Charles!”
The current of her emotions had now borne them both to the point of the chief interest. Charles shut and locked the door, and a confidential conversation
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ensued, in the course of which he ascertained, in answer to one of his first and most anxious inquiries, that it was customary for one individual or more, to pass the last night in the cell of the condemned; and on applying soon after to the jailor, and stating his interest in the prisoner, he obtained permission to keep this sad vigil.
The jailor in due time conducted him to the cell, and having removed that bars and bolts, “Hush-hark,” he whispered, “the minister is at prayer – Ah, he’s come to! – this is the first time the hardened fellow has let any one pray with him.” Charles eagerly peeped through the crevice of the door – a lamp was standing on the floor before the clergyman, who was engaged in loud and earnest intercessions, while the subject of the prayer, heedless or scornful, was pacing up and down the narrow cell whistling an Indian hunting air, and followed at every turn by Biter. “The castaway!” muttered the jailor. The clergyman finished, and Charles sprang forward, pronouncing the prisoner’s name. Biter was instantly crouching at his feet and licking his hands. Whistler stood as if he were transfixed. He then tossed back the wiry locks that hung over his face, dashed off the gathering tears, suppressed his choking sobs, and, as if ashamed that nature had mastered and betrayed
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him, he threw himself on his straw and buried his face in his blanket. Such is the omnipotent power of the electric chain, which, proceeding from him ‘who is love,’ communicates a celestial spark to every spirit, however ignorant, however degraded. The Indian was obdurate and impassive, his heart was stone, while he looked only on those whom he hated, but it melted within him at the first sound of the voice, at the first glance of the eye he loved. For an instant the dreary cell, the jailor, the galling hand-cuffs – all forms and modes of punishment were forgotten; a blessed vision floated before him; he scented the fresh sweet woods; he trod on the soft ground; he heard the singing of the birds and the hunter’s cry. But it was momentary. The calenture passed at the first sound of the clergyman’s voice, who continued his ministrations by reading some appropriate passages of scripture, and concluded with a feeling exhortation. The jailor wept audibly. Charles covered his face, but Whistler gave no intimation that he listened. The clergyman at last rose to depart; he beckoned to Charles – “My young friend,” he said, “you seem to have some influence over this hardened man, use it for the good of his soul, so soon to be called before the judgment seat; I leave my bible and psalm book with
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you.” Charles bowed; but, his conscience reproaching him with something like hypocrisy in this implied assent, he said, “I respect the offices of religion; you, sir, have done your duty, I shall endeavour to do mine.”
The young midshipman’s manner, more perhaps than his words, struck the clergyman as equivocal, but it was not till the following day that he was able clearly to interpret both.
Though the jailor, in his double capacity of innkeeper and jailor, had enough to do on that memorable evening, he found time twice to revisit the prisoner’s cell, much to our young friend’s annoyance; but when, after midnight, he again appeared, Charles could not, or did not conceal his displeasure.
“It is too hard,” he said, “that this poor fellow must have his last rest broken in this way.”
“Soft and fair, young man, I must do my duty,” replied the officer of justice, and he reconnoitered the cell, first surveying the prisoner, who stretched and yawned on his pallet, and looking up scowling, as if he had been unkindly waked. He then approached the grated window; Charles’s heart throbbed as if it would have leaped from his bosom, and a tremulous motion of the blanket that covered the Indian might have been seen, but not a word, not a sound escaped
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either. The jailor passed the light over the bars, he grasped on with his hand. Charles felt every droop of blood within him rush to his head, but it tingled again at his finer ends as the jailor said, half to himself, half to Charles, “All’s right, all’s right. When the house got still, I mistrusted I heard a strange noise, but I was mistaken, it’s pretty safe trusting people, be they ever so young and daring, where the blacksmith has done the carpenter’s work.”
“Thank you for your hints,” retorted Charles proudly. “When may we expect the honour of another visit?”
“Betimes, betimes,” was the only reply; and betimes he reappeared. It was an hour before the day dawned. Charles met him at the door. “Oh!” he said imploringly, “do not wake him now; be merciful, and give him one more hour.”
The jailor said he did not “wish to be unmerciful, but that there was a great deal to be done, to get every thing in handsome order for the procession.” But when he looked in and saw the prisoner apparently sleeping sweetly and profoundly, he added, “Well, well, poor fellow! I can be doing something else for one hour,” and again he withdrew.
Punctual to the moment, in one hour precisely he returned – but to what an altered scene! The
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prisoner was gone! – the severed bars lay on the floor, with files and other instruments that had been used to detach them, and our young conspirator stood in the center of the cell; his arms folded, with an air of bold satisfaction at the success of his efforts, while his heart beat with the secret fear that those efforts must at last prove vain. The jailor stood for an instant riveted, then shouted an alarm, and seized Charles by the collar.
“Hands off!” cried Charles, repelling him. “I know my duty, and I will follow you; lock me up where you please, but do not touch me.” There was not time to be lost in parleying or contending. The jailor conveyed Charles to the nearest vacant apartment, which happened to overlook the street in front of the jail. Charles took his station at the grated window, and, breaking through a pane of glass, he remained there, all eye and ear, to get what intimation he might of the fugitive’s peril or reapprehension, which, calculating the little time he had in advance of his pursuers, Charles scarcely hoped could be avoided.
The jail, the whole village, rang with cries of alarm. Men and women came pouring out, half awake and half dressed. The high sheriff was among them, and he immediately directed the pursuit.
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“Let every house, every hiding place in the neighbourhood be searched,” he cried, “he cannot yet have cleared the village.” The jailor ran off with half a score of men; but, halting for a moment, he said, “Mr. Sheriff – there are holsters sleeping in the barn; had they not best be called and sent off on horseback?” The sheriff immediately assented, by directing they should be waked and bidden to lead out their horses and take orders.
They shortly appeared, and a little in advance of the rest, and leading a high-mettled horse, was a tall fellow, extremely thin, with gray pantaloons, boots, a gray cloth round-about buttoned tight to his throat, a check neckcloth, a mass of dark curling hair, bushy whiskers, and a cloth cap. At the first glance at this man, Charles exclaimed “Heaven preserve us!” But who, that had not witnessed the putting on of the disguise, could have suspected that the person who so coolly led up the horse, and stood with such firmness even within the sheriff’s grasp, was the very felon over whom the sentence of death, suspended by the slightest thread, still hung? “And there is Biter too!” half articulated Charles, as his eye fell on the dog, who in the joy of recovered freedom was running hither and yon, with his nose to the ground, shaking his ears, wagging his tail, and snuffing up the fresh
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smell of dewy earth. “Oh, Biter! Why could not I make you stay with me? every body knows his dog. Good heaven Whistler! why don’t you turn your face from the sheriff?”
“Which way shall I go, sir,” asked Whistler of the sheriff. “Ha, “ thought Charles, “I should not know his voice myself.” “Go west, my good fellow,” replied the sheriff; “you have the best horse, and Sam will most like to take that direction. Give notice of his flight to the people on the road. Take a circuit, and come in by the north. You must all be in before night.”
“Yes, sir,” replied Whistler, and mounted his horse, but so unskillfully (for he was as ignorant of horsemanship as his brethren of the wild west) that Charles thought “every body must see the Indian now,” when a new alarm reached him. Mammy appeared on the steps, and thinking, in her blind zeal, that she was delaying the pursuit, screamed at the top of her voice, “Stop that fellow, he is on my horse.”
“Oh Mammy,” murmured Charles, “you have ruined all.” Whistler halted, faced about, and asked the sheriff in the most composed voice, “if he should get another horse?”
The sheriff turned to Mammy, “Do not be
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unreasonable, my good woman,” he said; “the man is to return to-day, and I will be answerable for your horse.”
“But he’s a hired horse sir,” pertinaciously persisted Mammy, “and besides, who knows that fellow that’s on him?”
Charles lost his patience and his self-possession, and screamed through the broken window, “Let him go, Mammy.”
But even this imprudence did not put Whistler off his guard. He gave one glance to Charles that spoke volumes, and then, assuming a look as simple as Mr. Slender’s, he said, “La, old mother, every body hereabouts knows me; I don’t live six miles off; my name is John Smith.”
“Thank heaven, “ thought Charles, “he remembers the name I gave him.” Mammy saw she could effect no farther delay, and muttering, “I suppose the high sheriff must do as he likes, but mind, you sir, don’t you ride that horse fast,” she returned with a heavy heart into the house.
Whistler ventured one more glance at Charles. He even ventured more, for as he again turned the horse’s head he whistled, loud and shrill, one bar of the tune Charles had most loved in their merry greenwood rambles. He then rode off sharply, followed
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by Biter, and soon turning out of the main street to a due west course, disappeared from sight.
All day the pursuit was maintained by foot and horse, but at evening the pursuers returned without any tidings of the fugitive. All returned save the rider of Mammy’s horse, and his absence was explained to the wondering community the next morning, by the appearance of the good steed at his stable door in Shelburne. A full brown wig and whiskers were bound around his neck and well secured by a silk handkerchief marked with the initials C.V. The secret was now out, and there being no vindictiveness towards the fugitive among the kind-hearted people of Berkeley county, there was a prevailing satisfaction in his hair-breadth scape, and a general admiration of the zeal and ingenuity of his young preserver. This was greatly augmented by the belief, disseminated by Charles’s friends and Mammy’s gossips, of Whistler’s innocence of the alleged crime, a belief shortly after substantiated by Ira’s death-bed confession. Charles remained in durance till a statement of the affair, accompanied by a petition for his full pardon, signed by half the entire population of Berkeley county, could be forwarded to the governor. An answer of grace was returned, accompanied by a very proper and severe reprimand
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of the presumption of a youth of fifteen, who had had the hardihood to oppose his opinion to the verdict of twelve honest men, and thereupon to counteract the judicial sentence of the law.
But presumption is the sin of youth. Charles was forgiven his, and, it may be, loved the better for it. Whistler was never again heard of, unless a singular and affecting interview that occurred, many years after, between an Indian who came in a canoe, with a dog blind and decrepit with age, to Perry’s fleet on lake Erie, and a gallant officer who had earned laurels in celebrated victory of the preceding day, revealed the fugitive from BERKELEY JAIL.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Berkeley Jail
Subject
The topic of the resource
Prison, Loyalty, Love, Native Americans
Description
An account of the resource
The narrator recounts the story of the Vassal family, whose only surviving member and an old family servant rescue a Native American man, held for the murder of a local white property owner.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<em>The Atlantic Souvenir</em>, Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1831: 13-53
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Carey and Lea
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1831
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Shawn Riggins, Ciara Freeman, D. Gussman
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English
1831
alcoholism
Atlantic Souvenir
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civilization
Dogs
Gilbert Glossing
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1826
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MODERN CHIVALRY.
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BY THE AUTHOR OF REDWOOD.
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“But when the hour of trouble comes to the mind or the body---and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low---Oh, my leddy, then it is’na what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly.”---Heart of Midlothian.
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THE assertion that a tale is founded on fact, is a pious fraud of story tellers, too stale to impose on any but the very young, or very credulous. We hope therefore, not to be suspected of resorting to an expedient that would expose our poverty without relieving it, when we declare that the leading incidents of the following tale are true—that they form, in that district of country where some of the circumstances transpired, a favourite and well authenticated tradition—and that our hero boasts with well-earned self-complacency, that there is no name better known than his from ‘Cape May to the Head of Elk.’ That name, however honourable as it is, must be suppressed, and we here honestly beg the possessor’s pardon for compelling him, for the first time in his life, to figure under false colours.
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In the year 1768, an American vessel lying in the Thames and bound to Oxford, a small sea-port on the eastern shore of Maryland, was hailed by a boat containing a youth, who, on presenting himself to the captain, stated that he had a fancy for a sailor’s life, and offered his services for two years, on the simple condition of kind treatment. The captain, though himself a coarse illiterate man, perceived in the air and language of the lad indications of good breeding, and deeming him some disobedient child, or possibly a runaway apprentice, declined receiving him. But William Herion, as he called himself, was so earnest in his solicitations, and engaging in his manners, and the captain, withal, in pressing need of a cabin-boy, that he waved his scruples, quieted his conscience with the old opiate that it was best not to be more nice than wise, and without inquiring too curiously into the boy’s right of self-disposal, drew up some indentures, by which he entitled himself to two years’ service.
The boy was observed for the first day to wear a troubled countenance. His eye glanced around with incessant restlessness, as if in eager search of some expected object. While the ship glided down the Thames, he gazed on the shore as if he looked for some signal on which his life depended, and when she passed Gravesend, the last point of embarkation, he wept convulsively. The captain believed him to be dis-
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turbed with remorse of conscience; the sailors, that these heart-breakings were lingerings for his native land, and all hinted their rude consolations. Soothed by their friendly efforts, or by his own reflections, or perhaps following the current of youth that naturally flows to happiness, William soon became tranquil, and sometimes even gay. He kept, as the sailors said, on the fair weather side of the captain, a testy, self-willed old man, who loved but three things in the world—his song, his glass, and his own way.
All that had been fabled of the power of music over stones and brutes, was surpassed by the effect of the lad’s melting voice on the icy heart of the captain, whom frty years of absolute power had rendered as despotic as a Turkish Pacha. When their old commander blew his stiffest gale, as the sailors were wont to term his blustering passions, Will could, they said, sing him into a calm. Will of course became a doting piece to the whole ship’s company. They said he was a trim built lad, too neat and delicate a piece of workmanship for the stormy sea. They laughed at his slender fingers, fitter to manage threads than ropes, passed many jokes upon his soft blue eyes and fair round cheeks, and in their rough language expressed Sir Toby’s prayer, that “Jupiter in his next commodity of hair, would send the boy a beard.” In the main Will bore their jokes without flinching, and returned them with even measure; but sometimes when they verged to rudeness, his rising blush or a tear
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stealing from his downcast eye, expressed an instinctive and unsullied modesty, whose appeal touched the best feelings of these coarse men.
The ship made a prosperous voyage, and in due time arrived off the American coast. It is a common custom with sailors to greet the first sight of land with a sacrifice to Bacchus. The natural and legalized revel was as extravagant on this, as it usually is on similar occasions. The captain with unwonted good humour, dealt out the liquor most liberally to the crew, and bade William sing them his best songs. Will obeyed, and song after song, and glass after glass carried them, as they said, far above high water mark. Their language and manners became intolerable to William, and he endeavoured to steal away with the intention of hiding himself in the cabin, till the revel was over. One of the sailors suspecting his design, caught him rudely and swore he would detain him in his arms. William struggled, freed himself, and darted down the companion way, the men following and shouting.
The captain stood at the entrance of the cabin door. William sunk down at his feet terrified and exhausted, and screaming “protect me—oh! For the love of heaven, protect me.”
The captain demanded the occasion of the uproar, and ordered the men to stand back. They, however, stimulated to reckless courage, and in sight of the land and independence, no longer feared his authority, and
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they swore that they would not be balked of their frolic. Poor Will, already feeling their hands upon him, clung in terror to the captain, and one fear overcoming another, confessed that his masculine dress was a disguise, and wringing his hands with shame and anguish, supplicated protection as a helpless girl.
The sailors touched with remorse and pity, retreated; but the brutal captain spurned the trembling supplicant with his foot, swearing a round oath that it was the first time he had been imposed on, and it should be the last. Unfortunately the old man, priding himself on his sagacity, was as confident of his own infallibility as the most devoted Catholic is of the Pope’s. This was his last voyage, and after playing Sir Oracle, for forty years—to have been palpably deceived—incontrovertibly outwitted by a girl of fifteen, was a mortification that his vanity could not brook. He swore he would have his revenge, and most strictly did he perform his vow. He possessed a plantation in the vicinity of Oxford; thither he conveyed the unhappy girl, and degraded her to the rank of a common servant, among the negro slaves in his kitchen.
The captain’s wrath was magnified, by the stranger’s persisting in refusing to disclose the motive of her deception, to reveal her family, or even to tell her name. Her new acquaintance were at a loss what to call her, till the captain’s daughter, who had been
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on a visit to Philadelphia, and seen the Winter’s Tale performed there, bestowed on her the pretty appellative of Hermione’s lost child, Perdita.
The captain, a common case, was the severest sufferer by his own passions. His wife complained that his “venture,” as she provokingly styled poor Perdita, was a useless burden on her household—“a fine lady born and bred, like feathers, and flowers, and French goods, pretty to look at, but fit for no use in the world.” The captain’s daughters partly instigated by compassion, and partly by the striking contrast between the delicate graces of the stranger and their own buxom beauty, incessantly teased their father to send her back to her own country; and neighbours and acquaintances were forever letting fall some observation on the beauty of the girl, or some allusion to her story, that was a spark of fire to the captain’s gunpowder temper.
Weeks and months rolled heavily on without a dawn of hope to poor Perdita. She was too young and inexperienced herself, to contrive any mode of relief, and no one was likely to undertake voluntarily the difficult enterprise of rescuing her from her thraldom. Her condition was thus forlorn, when her story came to the ears of Frank Stuart, a gallant young sailor on board the Hazard, a vessel lying in the stream off Oxford, and on the eve of sailing for Cowes in the Isle of Wight. Frank stood deservedly high in the confidence of his commander, and on
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Sunday, the day preceding that appointed for the departure of the ship, he obtained leave to go on shore. His youthful imagination was excited by the story of the oppressed stranger, and he strolled along the beach in the direction of her master’s plantation, in the hope of gratifying his curiosity by a glimpse of her. As he approached the house, he perceived that the front blinds were closed, and inferring thence that the family were absent, he ventured within the bounds of the plantation, and saw at no great distance from him a young female sitting on a bench beneath a tree. She leaned her head against its trunk, with an air of dejectedness and abstraction, that encouraged the young man to hope he had already attained his object. As he approached nearer, the girl started from her musings and would have retreated to the house, but suddenly inspired by her beauty and youth with a resolution to devote himself to her service, he besought her to stop for one instant and listen to him. She turned and gazed at him as if she would have perused his heart. Frankness and truth were written on his face by the finger of heaven. She could not fear any impertinence from him, and farther assured by his respectful manner, when he added, “I have something particular to say to you—but we must luff and bear away, for we are in too plain sight of the look out there,” and he pointed to the house—she smiled and followed him to a more secluded part of the grounds. As soon as he was sure
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of being beyond observation, “Do you wish,” he asked with professional directness, “to return to old England?”
She could not speak, but she clasped her hands, and the tears gushed like an open fountain from her eyes—“you need not say any more—you need not say any more,” he exclaimed, for he felt every tear to be a word spoken to his heart—“If you will trust me,” he continued, “I swear, and so God help me as I speak the truth, I will treat you as if you were my sister. Our ship sails to-morrow morning at day light, make a tight bundle of your rigging, and meet me at twelve o’clock to-night at the gate of the plantation. Will you trust me?”
“Heaven has sent you to me,” replied the poor girl, her face brightening with hope, “and I will not fear to trust you.”
They then separated—Perdita to make her few preparations, and Frank to contrive the means of executing his romantic enterprise.
Precisely at the appointed hour the parties met at the place of rendezvous. Perdita was better furnished for her voyage than could have been anticipated, from the durance she had suffered. A short notice and a scant wardrobe, were never known to oppose an obstacle to a heroine’s compassing sea and land; but as we have dispensed with the facilities of fiction, we are bound to account for Perdita’s being in possession of the necessaries of life, and it is due to the
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captain’s daughter to state, that her feminine sympathy had moved her from time to time to grant generous supplies to Perdita, which our heroine did not fail to acknowledge on going away, by a letter enclosing a valuable ring.
A few whispered sentences of caution, assurance and gratitude, were reciprocated by Frank and Perdita, as they bent their hasty steps to the landing-place where he had left his boat; and when he had handed her into it, and pushed from the shore on to his own element, he felt the value of the trust which this beautiful young creature had reposed to him. Never in the days of knightly deeds was there a sentiment of purer chivalry, than that which inspired the determined resolution and romantic devotion of the young sailor. He was scarcely twenty, the age of fearless project, and self-confidence. How soon is the one checked by disappointments—the other humbled by experience of the infirmity of human virtue!
Stuart had not confided his designs to any of his shipmates. He was therefore obliged warily to approach the ship, and to get on board with the least possible noise. He had just time to secrete Perdita amidst bales of tobacco, in the darkest place in the hold of the vessel, when a call of “all hands on deck,” summoned him to duty. He was foremost at his post, and all was stir and bustle to get the vessel under way. The sails were hoisted—the anchor
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weighed, and all in readiness, when a signal was heard from the shore, and presently a boat filled with men seen approaching. The men probed to be Perdita’s master, a sheriff, and his attendants. They produced a warrant empowering them to search the vessel. The old captain affirmed that the girl had been seen on the preceding day, talking with a young spark, who was known to have come on shore from the Hazard. In his fury he foamed at the mouth, swore he would have the runaway dead or alive, and that her aider and abettor should be given over to condign punishment. The master of the Hazard declared, that if any of his men were found guilty, he would resign them to the dealings of land law, and to prove if there was a plot, he was quite innocent, but he not only freely abandoned his vessel to the search, but himself was most diligent in the inquest. The men were called up, confronted and examined; not one appeared more cool and unconcerned than Frank Stuart, and after every inquiry, after ransacking as they believed, in every possible place of concealment, the pursuers were compelled to withdraw, baffled and disappointed.
The vessel proceeded on her voyage.—Frank requested the captain’s permission to swing a hammock alongside his birth, on the pretence that the birth was rendered damp and unwholesome by a leak in the deck above it. The reasonable petition was of course granted, and when night had closed watch-
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ful eyes, and dropped her friendly veil, so essential to the clandestine enterprises of the most ingenious, Frank rescued Perdita from a position, in which she had suffered not only the inconveniences, but the terrors of an African slave; and wrapping her in his own dreadnought, and drawing his watchcap over her bright luxuriant hair, he conducted her past the open door of the captain’s state-room, and past his sleeping companions, to his own birth; then whispering to her, “that she was safe as a ship in harbour,” he gave her some bread and a glass of wine, for which he had bartered his allowance of spirits, and laid himself down in his own hammock, to the companionship of such thoughts as are ministering angels about the pillow of the virtuous.
The following day a storm arose—a storm still remembered, as the most terrible and disastrous that ever occurred in Chesapeake Bay. There were several passengers of consequence on board the Hazard, among others two deacons who were going to the mother country to receive orders—for then, we of the colonies, who have since taken all rights into our own hands, dared not exercise the rights God had given us, without the assent of the Lords Bishops. Night came on, the storm increased, and then, when the ship was in extremity, when death howled in every blast, when “the timid shrieked and the brave stood still”—then was the unwearied activity, the exhaustless invention, and the unconquerable re-
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solution of Frank Stuart, the last human support and help of the unhappy crew. The master of the Hazard was advanced in life, and unnerved by the usual feebleness and timidity of age. He had but just enough presence of mind left, to estimate the masterly conduct of young Stuart, and he abandoned the command of the vessel to him, and retired to what is too often only a last resource—to prayers with the churchmen.
Once or twice Stuart disappeared from the deck, ran to whisper a word of encouragement to his trembling charge, and then returned with renewed vigour to his duty. Owing, under Providence, to his exertions, the Hazard rode out a storm which filled the seaman’s annals with many a tale of terror. Gratitude is too apt to rest in second causes, in the visible means of deliverance, and perhaps an undue portion was now felt towards the intrepid youth. The passengers lavished their favours on him—they supplied his meals with the most delicate wines and fruits, and the choicest viands from their own stores; he, with the superstition characteristic of his profession, firmly believed that heaven had sent the storm to unlock their hearts to him, and thus afford him the means of furnishing Perdita with dainties suited to her delicate appetite, so that she fared, as he afterwards boasted, like the daughter of a king in her father’s palace.
Stuart was kept in a state of perpetual alarm by the mate of the vessel. He knew that this fellow, one
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of those imbeciles that bend like a reed before a strong blast, had been hostile to him ever since the storm, when the accidental superiority of his station had been compelled to bow to Frank’s superior genius. He was aware that the mate had, by malicious insinuations, estranged the captain from him, and he was but too certain that he should have nothing to hope, if his secret were discovered by this base man. Perhaps this apprehension gave him an air of unwonted constraint in the presence of his enemy; certain it is, the mate’s eye often rested on him with an expression of eager watchfulness and suspicion, and Stuart, perceiving it, would contract his brow and compress his lips, in a way that betrayed how hard he strove with his rising passion. The difficulty of concealment was daily increasing, as one after another of his messmates, either from some inevitable accident, or from a communication becoming necessary on his part, obtained possession of his secret. But his ascendency over them was complete, and by threats or persuasions, he induced them all to promise inviolable secrecy. There is an authority in a determined spirit, to which men naturally do homage. It is heaven’s own charter of a power, to which none can refuse submission.
Frank never permitted his comrades to approach Perdita, or to speak a word to her; but in the depths of the night, when the mate’s and the old captain’s senses were locked in sleep, he would bring her forth
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to breathe the fresh air. Seated on the gunwale, she would bestow on him the only reward in her gift—the treasures of her sweet voice; and Frank said the winds sat still in the sails to listen. There were times when not a human sound was heard in the ship, when these two beings, borne gently on by the tides in mid ocean, felt as if they were alone in the universe.
It was at such times that Frank felt an irrepressible curiosity to know something more of the mysterious history of Perdita, whose destiny heaven, he believed, had committed to his honour; and once he ventured to introduce the topic nearest his heart, by saying, “you bade me call you Perdita, but I do not like the name; it puts me too much in mind of those rodomontade novels, that turn the girls’ heads and set them asailing, as it were, without chart or compass, in quest of unknown worlds”—He hesitated; it was evident he had betaken himself to a figure, to avoid an explicit declaration of his wishes—after a moment’s pause he added—“it suits me best to be plain-spoken—it is not the name that I object to so much, but—but, hang it—I think you know Frank Stuart now, well enough to trust him with your real name.”
The unhappy girl cast down her eyes, and said “that Perdita suited her better than any other name.”
“Then you will not trust me?”
“Say not so, my noble, generous friend,” she ex-
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claimed—“trust you!—have I not trusted you!—you know that I would trust you with any thing that was my own—but my name—my father’s name, I have forfeited by my folly.”
“Oh no—that you shall not say—a brave ship is not run down with a light breeze, and a single folly of a young girl cannot sink a good name—a folly!” he continued, thus indirectly pushing inquiries, “if it is a folly, it’s a common one—there’s many a stouter heart than your’s, that’s tried to face a gale of love, and been obliged to bear about and scud before the wind.”
“Who told you?—how did you discover?” demanded Perdita in a hurried, alarmed manner.
Frank’s generous temper disdained to surprise the unwary girl into confidence, and he immediately surrendered the advantage he had gained. “Nobody has told me,” he said—“I have discovered nothing—I only guessed, as the yankees say—now wipe away your tears—the sea wants no more salt water, and believe me Frank Stuart has not such a woman’s spirit in him, that he cannot rest content without knowing a secret.”
In spite of Frank’s manly resolution, he did afterwards repeatedly intimate the longings of his curiosity, but they were always met with such unaffected distress on the part of Perdita, that he said he had not the heart to press them.
As the termination of the voyage approached,
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Stuart became more intensely anxious lest his secret should be discovered. Stuart became more intensely anxious lest his secret should be discovered. The mildest consequence would be, that he should forfeit his wages. That he cared not for¬—like Goldsmith’s poor soldier, he could lie on a bare board, and thank God he was so well off. “While he had youth and health,” he said, “and there was a ship afloat on the wide sea, he was provided for.” But his companions who had been true to him might forfeit their pay; for, by their fidelity to him, they had in some measure become his accessaries. But he found consolation even under this apprehension; “the honest lads,” he said, “would soon make a full purse empty, but the memory of a good action was a treasure gold could not buy—a treasure that would stick by them forever—a treasure for the port of heaven.” There was, however, one apprehended evil, for which his philosophy offered no antidote.
He was sure the captain would deem it his duty, or make it his will, (even Frank’s slight knowledge of human nature told him that will and duty were too often convertible terms,) to return the fugitive to her soi-disant master in Maryland. Nothing could exceed the vigilance with which he watched every movement and turn that threatened a detection, or the ingenuity with which he evaded every circumstance that tended to it—but alas! the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.
One night when it was blowing a gale, a particular
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rope was wanted, which the mate remembered to have stowed away in the steerage. Frank eagerly offered to search for it, but the mate was certain that no one but himself could find it, and taking a lantern he went in quest of it. Frank followed him with fear and trembling. He has since been in many a desperate sea-fight, but he declares he never felt so much like a coward as at that moment. The mate’s irritable humour had been somewhat stirred by Frank’s persisting in his offer, to go for the rope, and when he turned and saw him at his heels, he asked him angrily, “what he was dogging him for?” “The ship rolls so heavily,” replied Frank in a subdued tone, “that I thought you might want me to hold the lantern for you.” Frank’s unwonted meekness quite conciliated the mate, and though he rejoined, “I think I have been used to the rolling of a ship a little longer than you, young man,” he spoke good-naturedly, and Frank ventured to proceed.
Most fortunately, as Frank thought, the mate directed his steps to the side of the ship opposite Perdita, but making a little circuit in his return, he passed between Frank’s hammock and Perdita’s birth. At this moment the poor lad’s heart, as he afterwards averred, stopped beating. The ship rolled on that side, and the mate catching hold of the birth to save himself from falling, exclaimed, “In heaven’s name what lazy devil is here, when every hand is wanted on deck;” and raising his lantern to identify
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the supposed delinquent sailor, he discovered the beautiful girl. For a moment he was dumb with amazement, but soon recalling the search at Oxford, the whole truth flashed upon him: he turned to Frank, and shaking his fist in his face, “Ah, this is you, Stuart!” he said, and enforced his gesture with a horrible oath.
“Yes,” retorted Frank, now standing boldly forth, “it is me, thank God”—and then drawing a curtain that he had arranged before Perdita’s birth, he bade her fear nothing.
“Oh Frank,” she exclaimed, “I cannot fear where you are.” This involuntary expression of confidence went to her protector’s heart. There is no man so dead to sentiment, as not to be touched by the trust of woman, especially if she be young and beautiful. Frank was at the age when sentiment is absolute, and he was resolved to secure his treasure at every hazard. Perdita’s declaration, while it stimulated his zeal, awakened the mean jealousies of the mate.
“And so my pretty miss,” he said, “you fear nothing where this fellow is—I can tell you, for all that he may boast, and you may believe, he is neither master nor mate yet, and please the Lord I’ll prove as much to him this very night.”
“And how will you prove it?” asked Stuart, in a voice which, though as calm as he could make it, resembled the low growl of a bull dog before he springs on his victim.
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“I’ll prove it, my lad, by telling the whole story of your smuggled goods to the captain. A pretty piece of work this, to be carried on under the nose of your officers. It’s no better than a mutiny, for I’ll warrant it the whole ship’s crew are leagued with you.”
Stuart reined in his passions, and condescended to expostulate. He represented to the mate that he could gain nothing by giving information to the captain. He described with his simple eloquence, the oppression the poor girl had already suffered; the cruelty of disappointing her present hopes, just as they were on the point of being realized, for the ship was not more than twenty-four hours sail from Cowes; he appealed to his compassion, his generosity, his manliness, but in vain, he found no accessible point. The mean pride of having discovered the secret, and the pleasure of humbling Stuart, mastered every good feeling of the mate, if indeed he possessed any, and he turned away, saying with a sort of chuckling exultation, “that he should go and do his duty.”
“Stop,” cried Frank, grasping his arm with a gripe that threatened to crush it. “Stop and hear me—I swear by him that made me, if you dare so much as to hint by word, look or movement, the secret you have discovered here, you shall not cumber the earth another day—day—said I—no, not an hour—I’ll send you to the devil as swift as a canon ball ever went to the mark—Look,” he continued, tearing away the
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curtain he had just drawn before Perdita—“could any thing short of the malice of Satan himself contrive to harm such helpless innocence as that—do you hear me”—he added in a voice that outroared the storm—“in God’s name look at me, and see I am in earnest.”
The mate had no doubt to satisfy, he trembled like an aspen leaf—in vain he essayed to raise his eyes, the passion that glanced in Frank’s face, and dilated his whole figure, affected the trembling wretch like a stroke of the sun. He reeled in Frank’s iron grasp, his abject fear changed Stuart’s wrath to contempt, and giving him an impulse that sent him quite out of the door, he returned to sooth Perdita with the assurance that they had nothing to fear from the “cowardly dog.” She was confounded with terror, but much more frightened by the vehemence of Stuart’s passion than by the threats of the mate. She had always seen her protector move like an unobstructed stream along its course, in calm and silent power. Now he was the torrent, that no human force could control or direct.
She saw before her calamities far worse than any she had endured. She believed that the mate, as soon as he was recovered from his paroxysm of terror, would communicate his discovery. She apprehended the most fatal issue from Frank’s threats and determined resolution, and the possibility that his generous zeal for her might involve him in crime, was intolerable to her. Such thoughts do not become less
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terrible by solitary meditation—in the solemnity of night and amidst the howlings of a storm. Every blast spoke reproach and warning to Perdita, and tortured by those harpies remorse and fear, she took a sudden resolution to reveal herself to the captain, feeling at the moment that if she warded off evil from her protector, she could patiently abide the worst consequences to herself. She sprang from her birth as if afraid of being checked by a second thought, and rushed from the steerage to the cabin. All was perfect stillness there—the passengers had retired to their beds. The captain was sitting by the table, he had been reading, but his book had fallen to the floor, his head had sunk on his breast, and he was in a profound sleep. The light shone full on his weather-beaten face—on large uncouth features—on lines deepened to furrows—and muscles stiffened by time. Never was there an aspect more discouraging to one who needed mercy, and poor Perdita stood trembling before him and close to him, and dared not, could not speak. She heard a footstep approaching, still her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth. Then she heard her name pronounced in a low whisper at the cabin door, and turning, she saw Stuart there beckoning most earnestly to her. She shook her head, signed to him to withdraw, and laid her hand on the captain’s shoulder. There was but one way to thwart her intentions, and Frank’s was not a hesi-
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tating spirit, he sprang forward, caught her in his arms, and before the old man had rubbed his eyes fairly open, Perdita was again safe in the steerage.
Stuart’s threats produced the intended effect on the mate; he was completely intimidated. He scarcely ventured out of Frank’s sight lest he should incur his dangerous suspicions, and the next day the vessel, accelerated by the gale of the preceding evening, arrived at Cowes. The captain and mate immediately landed, and Stuart no longer embarrassed by their presence, was able to take the necessary measures for Perdita. She assured him that if once conveyed to the main land, to Portsmouth or Southampton, she could herself take the coach for London, and there, she said, happiness or misery awaited her, which her noble protector could neither promote or avert.
A wherry was procured. Before Perdita was transferred to it, she took leave of all the sailors, shook hands with each of them, and expressed to them individually, her gratitude and good wishes. Her words conveyed nothing but a sense of obligation, but there was something of condescension in her manner, and much of the grace of high station that contrasted strikingly with the abased, fearful, and shrinking air of the girl who had, till then, only been seen gliding like a spectre along the deck, attended by Stuart, and veiled by the shadows of night. As the wherry parted from the ship, she bowed her head
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and waved her handkerchief to Frank’s shipmates, and they returned her salutation with three loud cheers.
Stuart attended her to an inn at Portsmouth, engaged for her a seat in the London coach, and then followed her to a private apartment which he had secured, to bid her farewell.
Perdita, from the moment she had felt her emancipation from a degrading condition, and the joy of setting her foot again on her native land, had manifested perhaps, an undue elation of sprits, an elation so opposite to Frank’s feelings, that to him it was a grating discord; but when she saw him for the last time, every other emotion gave place to unfeigned sorrow and inexpressive gratitude.
Stuart laid a purse on the table beside her. “My shipmates” he said, “receive their wages to-morrow, so they have been right glad to make their pockets clear of the little trash that was in them, which may be of service to you, though it is of no use to them.”
“Oh Frank!” she exclaimed, “if I should ever have any thing in my gift—if I could but reward you for all you have done for me!”
All the blood in Frank’s heart rushed to his face, and he said in a voice almost inarticulate with offended pride, “there are services that money cannot buy, and thank God, there are feelings in a poor man’s breast worth more than all the gold in the king’s coffers.”
“Oh what have I said,” exclaimed Perdita, “I
[28]
would rather die—rather return to the depth of misery from which you rescued me—yes, ten times told, than to speak one word that should offend you—you to whom I owe every thing—my life—and more than life. I did not say—I did not think, that money could reward you.”
“Do not speak that word again,” said Frank, half ashamed of his pride, and half glorying in it. “Reward! I want none but your safety and the blessed memory of having done my duty. Money—ho! I care no more for it, than for the dust I tread upon.”
“I know it—I am sure of it,” cried Perdita, humbled for the moment by a sense of an elevation of soul in Frank, that exalted him far above any accidents of birth or education. “Frank, you are rich in every thing that is good and noble—and what am I, to talk of reward—poor—poor in every thing but gratitude to you, Frank—I am not poor in that—you must not then despise me, and you will not forget me—and you will keep this ring for my sake.”
Frank took the ring, and the lily hand she extended to him—his tears fell fast upon it—he struggled for a moment with his feelings, then dashed away his tears, and half-articulating “God bless you!” he hurried out the apartment. Thus separating himself from the beautiful young creature, for whom he had performed a most difficult service with religious fidelity; and of whose name even, he was forever to remain in ignorance.
[29]
The enterprising talent of Stuart ensured its appropriate reward. In one year from the memorable voyage above related, he commanded a vessel; and on the breaking out of the revolutionary war, he devoted himself to his country’s cause, with the fervent zeal with characterized and consecrated that cause—which made the common interest a matter of feeling—a family affair to each individual.
Stuart commanded an armed merchantman, and disputes with the noted Paul Jones the honour of having first struck down the British flag. However this may be, he was distinguished for his skill and intrepidity—and, above all, (and this distinction endures when the most brilliant achievements have become insignificant,) for his humanity to those whom the fortune of war cast in his power.
While on a cruise off the West Indies, Stuart intercepted an enemy’s ship bound to Antigua. His adversary was far superior to him in men and guns, but as it did not comport with Stuart’s bold spirit to make any very nice calculations of an enemy’s superiority, he prepared without hesitation for action. The contest was a very severe one, and the victory long doubtful; but at last the British captain struck his colours. Though we certainly are disposed to render all honour to the skill of our hero, yet we dare not claim for him the whole merit of his success, but rather solve the mystery of victory at such odds, by quoting the expression of a patriotic English boy,
[30]
who said on a similar occasion—“Ah, but the Americans would not have beaten, if the Lord had not been on their side.”
After the fight the English commander requested an interview with captain Stuart; he informed him that the wife and mother of the governor of Antigua were on board his vessel, and that they were almost distracted with terror; he entreated therefore that they might be received with the humanity which their sex demanded, and the deference always due to high station. Stuart replied, “that as to high station, he held that all God’s creatures, who feared their Creator and did their duty, were on a dead level—and as to the duties of humanity, he trusted no American captain need go further than his own heart, for instructions how to perform them.” The British captain was ignorant of the spirit of the times, and auguring nothing favourable from Stuart’s republican reply, returned with a heavy heart to the ladies to conduct them on board the captor’s ship. The elder lady the mother, was a woman of rank, with all the pride and prejudice of high birth. The Americans she deemed all of that then much despised order—the common people; rebels and robbers were the best names she bestowed on them, and in the honesty of her ignorance she sincerely believed that she had fallen into the hands of pirates. The younger lady, though deeply affected by their disastrous situation, endeavoured to calm her mother’s apprehensions, and assured her that
[31]
she had heard there were men of distinguished humanity among the American sailors. The old lady shook her head incredulously. “Oh heaven help us,” she groaned, “what can we expect from such horrid fellows, when they know they have lady Strangford and the right honourable Mrs. Liston in their power—and your beauty, Selina! your beauty child! it is a fatal treasure to fall among thieves with—depend on’t— arrange your veil so that it will hang in thick folds over your face—I will draw my hood close.” The precaution on her part seemed quite superfluous, but the young lady obscured some of heaven’s cunningest workmanship with her impervious veil.
The servants were ordered to deliver the ladies baggage to the American captain, with a request that some necessaries might be reserved. Stuart answered that he interfered with no private property, and that all the baggage of the ladies remained at their disposal.
Lady Strangford was somewhat reassured by this generosity, and attended by her captain and followed by her daughter and servants, she proceeded to Stuart’s ship. Stuart advanced to meet them and offered her his hand—she proudly declined it and passed silently on. A gust of wind blew back her hood—“Faith!” exclaimed one of the sailor who observed the scrupulosity with which she replaced it, “the old lady had best show her face, for I’m sure we’ll all give a good birth to such an iron-bound coast as that.” But as the same breeze blew aside the young lady’s
[32]
veil, there was a general murmur of admiration. She had at the moment graciously accepted the tender of Stuart’s hand, in the hope of counteracting the impression of her mother’s rudeness, and when her veil was removed he had a full view of her face; conscious that many were gazing on her, she blushed deeply, and hastily readjusted it without raising her eyes. Stuart dropped her hand—smothered an exclamation, and retreated a few paces, leaving her to follow her mother alone.
One of his officers observing his emotion, said, “How is this captain? you don’t wink at a broadside, and yet you start at one flash from a lady’s bright face.”
“I got a scratch on my right arm in the engagement,” returned Stuart, evading the raillery, “and the lady’s touch gave me a pang.”
He then retired to his state-room, and wrote the following note, which he directed to be delivered to the young lady. “Captain Stuart’s compliments to the ladies under his protection—he incloses a ring once bestowed upon him in acknowledgment of honourable conduct, as a pledge to them that the hand that has worn such a badge shall never be sullied by a bad deed. Captain Stuart will proceed immediately to Antigua, conveying the ladies with the least possible delay to their destined port.” Such a communication to prisoners of war, might naturally excite emotion in a generous bosom, but it did not account for the ex-
[33]
cess of it manifested by the young lady. She became pale and faint, and when her mother, alarmed at such a demonstration of feeling, took up the note, she caught it from her, and then, after a second thought, relinquished it to her.
“I see nothing in this Selina,” said the old lady, after perusing and reperusing it, “to throw you into such a flurry, but you are young, and are thinking no doubt of getting home to your husband and children, young people’s feelings, are, like soft wax, easily melted.”
“There is a warmth in some kindness,” rejoined the daughter earnestly, “that ought to melt the hardest substance.”
“Really, I do not see any thing so very striking in this man’s civility. It would be, of course you know in the British navy; politeness, and all that sort of thing being inborn in an Englishman, but it may be, indeed I fancy it is, quite unheard of in an American.”
“Shall I write our acknowledgments, madam, to captain Stuart?” asked the young lady with evident solicitude to drop the conversation.
“Certainly—certainly, my dear Selina, always be ceremoniously polite with your inferiors.”
“Madam, I think this noble captain,” she would have added, “has no superiors,” but afraid of further discussion, she concluded her sentence with the tame addition, “richly deserves our thanks.”
She then wrote the following note. “Mrs. Liston,
[34]
in behalf of her mother in law lady Strangford, and on her own part, offers her warmest thanks to captain Stuart—the ladies esteem it heaven’s peculiar mercy that captain Stuart is their captor. They have already had such experience of his magnanimity, as to render them perfectly tranquil in reposing their safety and happiness on his honour.” The ring, without any allusion to it, was reinclosed.
When captain Stuart had perused the note, he inquired if the lady had not requested to speak with him. He was answered that so far from intimating such a wish, she had said to her mother that she should remain in her state-room, till she was summoned to leave captain Stuart’s vessel. The captain looked extremely chagrined, he knit his brows, and bit his lips, and gave his orders hastily, with the usual sea expletives appended to them—“a sure sign,” his men said, “that something went wrong with their captain,” but these signs of repressed emotion were all the expression he allowed to his offended pride, or perhaps his better feelings. The Ladies were scrupulously served, and every deferential attention paid to them that lady Strangford would have anticipated in the best disciplined ship in his majesty’s service.
A few days’ sail brought the schooner to the port of Antigua. She entered the harbour under a flag of truce, and remained there just time enough for the disembarkation of the ladies and their suite. During this ceremony the captain remained in his birth, under
[35]
pretext of a violent head-ache; but it was observed that they were no sooner fairly off than he was on the deck again, moving about with an activity and even impetuosity that seemed quite incompatible with a debilitating malady.
Captain Stuart continued for some months a fortunate cruise about the West India islands. His was not the prudent maxim that “discretion is the better part of valour,” but when valour would have been bootless he knew how to employ the alternative, and his little schooner was celebrated as the most desperate fighter and the swiftest sailor in those seas, and her captain became so formidable, that the English admiral off that station gave orders that the schooner should be followed and destroyed at all hazards.
Soon after this he was pursued by a ship of the line and compelled to take refuge in the harbour of St. Kitts, a French, and of course a friendly port to the American flag. Here he anchored his vessel, and deeming himself perfectly secure, and wearied with hard duty, he retired to his birth after setting a watch, and dismissing his crew to repose. In the middle of the night he was alarmed by an attack from the pursuing frigate, which had contrived to elude the vigilance of the fort that guarded the entrance of the harbour, and was already in such a position in relation to him as to cut off every possibility of escape. His spirit, far from quailing, was exasperated by the surprise. He fought as the most courageous animals
[36]
fight at bay. To increase the horror of his situation, the commander of the fort, from some fatal mistake, opened a fire upon him. He was boarded on all sides by boats manned with eighty-four men. We are too ignorant of such matters, and too peaceably inclined to give any interest to the particulars of a sea-fight. Suffice it to say, that our hero did not surrender till he was himself disabled by wounds, his little band cut down, and his schooner a wreck. When the British commander ascertained the actual force with which he had contended, his pride was stung with the consciousness that a victory so dearly bought, had all of defeat but the disgraceful name; and, incapable of that sympathy which a magnanimous spirit always feels with a noble captive, he arraigned captain Stuart before him as a criminal, and demanded of him how he dared against the law of nations, to defend an indefensible vessel.
“Did you think,” retorted Stuart with cold contempt, “that I had gunpowder and would not burn it? do you talk to me of the law of the nations! I fight after the law of nature, that teaches me to spend the last kernel of powder and the last drop of blood, in my country’s service.” His conqueror’s temper heated before, was inflamed by Stuart’s reply. He ordered him to be manacled and put into close confinement. This conduct may appear extraordinary in the commander of a British frigate, but the English, in their contest with the colonies were not always
[37]
governed by those generous principles, by which they have themselves so much alleviated the miseries of war. A defeated American was treated as a lawful enemy, or a rebel, as suited the individual temper of the conqueror.
The frigate was so much injured in the fight as to render a refit necessary, and her commander sailed with his prize for Antigua.
Stuart well knew that his fidelity to his country, rendered him obnoxious to the severest judgment from the admiralty court, and though he might plead the services he had rendered the ladies of the governor’s family in mitigation of his sentence, he proudly resolved never to advert to favours, which he had reason to believe had been lightly estimated.
Spirits most magnanimous in prosperity are often most lofty in adversity. Frank Stuart, mutilated by wounds, dejected by the fatal calamities of his faithful crew, irritated by the indignities heaped on him by his unworthy captor, and stung by secret thoughts of some real or fancied injury—chafed and overburdened with many griefs, received, and sullenly obeyed a summons to the presence of the governor. It cannot be denied, that reluctantly as he appeared before the governor, he surveyed him at his introduction with a look of keen curiosity. He was not surprised to see a man rather past his prime, though not yet declined into the vale of years. With generous allow-
[38]
ance for the effect of a tropical climate, he might not have been more than forty-five. His physiognomy was agreeable, and his deportment gentlemanly. He received captain Stuart with far more courtesy than was often vouchsafed from an officer of the crown, to one who fought under the rebel banner, and remarking that he looked pale and sick, he begged him to be seated.
Stuart declined the civility, and continued resting on a crutch, which a severe wound in his leg rendered necessary.
“You are the commander of the schooner Betsy?” said the governor.
“What’s left of him,” returned Stuart.
“You appear to be severely wounded,” continued the governor.
“Hacked to pieces,” rejoined Stuart, in a manner suited to the brevity of his reply.
“Your name, I believe, is Frank Stuart?”
“I have no reason to deny the name, thank God.”
“And, thank God, I have reason to bless and honour it,” exclaimed the governor, advancing and grasping Frank’s hand heartily. “What metal did you deem me of, my noble friend, that I should forget such favours as you conferred on me, in the persons of my wife and mother.”
“I have known greater favours than those forgotten,” said Frank, and the sudden illumination of his
[39]
pale face, showed how deeply he felt what he uttered.
“Say you so!” exclaimed the governor with good humoured warmth; “well, but that I am too poor to pay my own debts to you, I should count it a pleasure to assume those of all my species—but heaven grant, my friend, that you do not allude to my wife and mother. I blamed them much for not bringing you on shore with them—but my mother is somewhat over punctilious, and my wife, poor soul! her nerves were so shattered by that sea-fight, that she is but now herself again. On my word, so far from wanting gratitude to you, she never hears an allusion to you without tears, the language women deal in when words are too cold for them. But come,” concluded the governor, for he found that all his efforts did but add to Stuart’s evident distress, “come, follow me to the drawing-room, the ladies will themselves convince you, how impatient they have been to welcome you.”
“Are they apprised,” asked Stuart, still hesitating and holding back, “whom they are to see?”
“That are they—my mother is as much delighted as if his majesty were in waiting, and my wife is weeping with joy.”
“Perhaps,” said Stuart, still hesitating, “she would rather not see me now.”
“Nonsense, my good friend, come along. It is not for a brave fellow like you to shrink from a few friendly tears from a woman’s eye.”
[40]
Nothing more could be urged, and Stuart followed governor Liston to the presence of the ladies. Lady Strangford rose and offered him her hand with the most condescending kindness. Mrs. Liston rose too, but did not advance till her husband said, “come Selina, speak your welcome to our benefactor—he may misinterpret this expression of your feelings.”
“Oh no,” she said, now advancing eagerly, and fixing her eye on Stuart, while her cheeks, neck, and brow were suffused with crimson, “Oh no, Captain Stuart knows how deeply I must feel benefits, which none but he that bestowed them could forget or undervalue.”
“It was a rule my mother taught me,” replied Frank with bluntness, softened however by a sudden gleam of pleasure, “that givers should not have better memories than receivers.” There was a meaning in his honest phrase hidden from two of his auditors, but quite intelligible to her for whom it was designed, and to our readers, who have doubtless already anticipated that the honourable Mrs. Liston was none other than the fugitive Perdita. A sudden change of colour showed that she felt acutely Stuart’s keen though veiled reproach.
“A benefit,” she replied, still speaking in a double sense, “such as I have received from you, Captain Stuart, may be too deeply felt to be acknowledged by words—now heaven has given us the opportunity of deeds, and you shall find that my grati-
[41]
tude is only inferior to your merit.” Stuart was more accustomed to embody his feelings in action than speech, and he remained silent. He felt as if he were the sport of a dream, when he looked on the transformed Perdita. He knew not why, but invested as she now was, with all the power of wealth and the elegance of fashion, he felt not half the awe of her, as when in her helplessness and dependence, “he had fenced her rounde with many a spelle,” wrought by youthful and chivalric feeling.
He perceived, in spite of Mrs. Liston’s efforts, that his presence was embarrassing to her, and he would have taken leave, but the governor insisted peremptorily on his remaining to dine with him. Then saying that he had indispensable business to transact, and must be absent for a half hour, he would, he said, “leave the ladies to the free expression of their feelings.”
When he was gone, Mrs. Liston said to her mother, “I do not think your little favourite, Francis, is quite well to-day—will you have the goodness to look in upon him and give nurse some advice.” The old lady went without reluctance, as most people do to give advice, and Mrs. Liston turned to Stuart, and said, “I gave my boy your name, with a prayer that God would give him your spirit. Do not, oh do not think me,” she continued, her lip quivering with emotion, “the ungrateful wretch I have appeared. I am condemned to silence by the pride of another.
[42]
My heart rebels, but I am bound to keep that a secret, which my feelings prompt me to publish to the world.” Stuart would have spoken, but she anticipated him: “Listen to me without interruption,” she said, “my story is my only apology, and I have but brief space to tell it in. It was love, as you once guessed, that led me to that mad voyage to America. I had a silly passion for a young Virginian, who had been sent to England for his education—he was nineteen, I fifteen, when we promised to meet on board the ship which conveyed me to America. His purpose, but not his concert with me was discovered, and he was detained in England. You know all the events of my enterprise. I left a letter for my father, informing him that I had determined to abandon England, but I gave him not the slightest clue to my real designs. I was an only, and as you will readily believe, a spoiled child. My mother was not living, and my father hoping that I should soon return, and wishing to veil my folly, gave out that he has sent me to a boarding-school on the continent, and himself retired to Switzerland. When I arrived in London, I obtained his address and followed him. He immediately received me to apparent favour, but never restored me to his confidence. His heart was hardened by my childish folly, and though I recounted to him all my sufferings, I never drew a tear from him; but when I spoke of you, and dwelt on the particulars of your goodness to me, his eye would moisten, and he would exclaim,
[43]
‘God bless the lad.’ I must be brief,” she continued, casting her eye apprehensively at the door; “Mr. Liston came with his mother to Geneva, where we resided; he addressed me—my father favoured his suit, and though he is, as you perceive, much older than myself, I consented to marry him, but not, as I told my father, till I had unfolded my history to him. My father was incensed at what he called my folly—he treated me harshly—I was subdued, and our contest ended in my solemnly swearing never to divulge the secret, on the preservation of which he fancied the honour of his proud name to depend.”
“Thank God,” then exclaimed Frank with a burst of honest feeling, “it was not your pride, cursed pride, and I may still think on Perdita as a true, tender-hearted girl, it was a pleasant spot in my memory,” he continued, dashing away a tear, “and I hated to have it crossed with a black line.”
Mrs. Liston improved all that remained of her mother’s absence in detailing some particulars, not necessary to relate, by which it appeared that notwithstanding she had dispensed with the article of love in her marriage, (we crave mercy of our fair young readers,) her husband’s virtue and indulgence had matured a sentiment of affection, if not as romantic, yet quite as safe and enduring as youthful passion. She assured Stuart that she regarded him as the means of all her happiness. “Not a day passes,” she said, raising her beautiful eyes to heaven, “that I do not
[44]
remember my generous deliverer, where alone I am permitted to speak of him.” The old lady now rejoined them, bringing her grandchild in her arms. Frank threw down his crutch, forgot his wounds, and permitted his full heart to flow out, in the caresses he lavished on his little namesake.
The governor redeemed Stuart’s schooner, and made such representations before the admiralty court of Stuart’s merits, and of the ill treatment he had received from the commander of the frigate, that the court ordered the schooner to be refitted and equipped, and permitted to proceed to sea at the pleasure of captain Stuart. He remained for several days domesticated in the governor’s family, and treated by every member of it with a frank cordiality suited to his temper and merits. Every look, word and action of Mrs. Liston expressed to him, that his singular service was engraven on her heart. He forbore even to allude to it, and with his characteristic magnanimity never inquired, directly or indirectly, her family name. He observed a timidity and apprehensiveness in her manner that resulted from a consciousness that she had, however reluctantly, practiced a fraud on her husband, and he said “that having felt how burdensome it was to keep a secret from his commander for a short voyage, he thought it was quite too heavy a lading for the voyage of life.”
The demonstrations of gratitude which Stuart received from governor Liston and his family, he deem-
[45]
ed out of all proportion to his services, and being more accustomed to bestow than to receive, he became restless, and as soon as his schooner was ready for sea, he announced his departure, and bade his friends farewell. He said that the tears that Perdita, (he always called her Perdita,) shed at parting, were far more precious to him than all the rich gifts she had bestowed on him.
At the moment Stuart set his foot on the deck of his vessel, the American colours, at the governor’s command, were hoisted. The generous sympathies of the multitude were moved, and huzzas from a thousand voices rent the air. Governor Liston and his suite and most of the merchant vessels, then in port, escorted the schooner out of the harbour. Even the stern usages of war cannot extinguish that sentiment in the bosom of man, implanted by God, which leads him to do homage to a brave and generous foe.
Captain Stuart continued to the end of the war, to serve his country with unabated zeal, and, when peace was restored, the same hardy spirit that had distinguished him in perilous times, made him foremost in bold adventure.
He commanded the second American trading vessel that arrived at Canton after the peace; and this vessel with which he sailed over half the globe, was a sloop of eighty tons, little more than half the size of the largest now used for the river trade. This adventure will be highly estimated by those who have
[46]
been so fortu
nate as to read the merry tale of Dolph Heilegher, and who remember the prudence manifested, at that period, by the wary Dutchmen in navigating these small vessels: how they were fain to shelter themselves at night in the friendly harbours with which the river abounds, and, we believe, to avoid adventuring through Haverstraw bay or the Tappan sea, in a high wind.
When Stuart’s little sloop rode into the port of Canton, it was mistaken for a tender from a large ship, and the bold mariner was afterwards familiarly called by the great Hong merchants, “the one-mast captain.”
_____
Fifty-seven years have gone by since the Hazard sailed from Oxford, and our hero is now enjoying in the winter of his life, the fruits of a summer of activity and integrity. Time, which he has well used, has used him gently—his hair is a little thinned and mottled, but is still a sufficient shelter to his honoured head. His eye when he talks of the past, (all good old men love to talk of the past,) rekindles with the fire of youth, his healthful complexion speaks his temperance, and a double row of unimpaired ivory, justifies the pleasant vanity of his boast, that he can still show his teeth to an enemy.
Professional carelessness or generosity has left him little of the world’s ‘gear,’ but he is rich—for he is independent of riches. He says he would recom-
[47]
mend honest dealings and an open hand, to all who would lay up stores of pleasant thoughts for their old age; and he avers—and who will gainsay him, that in the silent watches of the night, the memory of money well bestowed is better than a pocket full of guineas. He loves to recount his boyish pranks, and recal his childish feelings—how he rattled down the chincapins on the devoted heads of a troop of little girls; and how he was whipped for crying to go with Braddock and be a soldier! but above all, he loves to dwell on some of the particulars we have related, and in the sincerity of religious feeling to ascribe praise to that being, who kept his youth within the narrow bound of strict virtue.
I saw him last week surrounded by his grandchildren, recounting his imminent dangers and hair bread ‘scapes to a favourite boy, while the nimble fingers of rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed little girls were employed in making sails for a miniature ship, which the old man has just completed. Long may he enjoy the talisman that recals to his imagination, labour without its hardship, and enterprise without its failure—and God grant gentle breezes and a clear sky to the close of his voyage of life!
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Modern Chivalry
Subject
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Runaways, female virtue, chivalry, heroism, Revolutionary War.
Description
An account of the resource
A young American sailor rescues a mysterious young female English runaway, and goes on to become a heroic naval captain in the Revolutionary War, and a later a prosperous merchant.
Creator
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Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. [By the author of Redwood]
Source
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The Atlantic Souvenir, 5-47
Publisher
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H. C. Carey & Lea
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1826
Contributor
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Dr. Jenifer Elmore with Megan Konynenbelt, Sarah Selden, and Rachel Sakrisson; D. Gussman
Relation
A related resource
Reprinted in New-York Mirror, edited by Horace Greeley, 25- Nov. 1826: 137-39.
Collected in The Ladies' Monthly Museum, Vol. XXV pp. 260-264, 325-331 and Vol. XXVI pp. 29-36, 91-97, London: Dean and Munday, 1827.
Collected in Lights and Shadows of American Life, vol.. 3, edited by Mary Russell Mitford, 226-73, London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1832.
Collected in Yorkshire Literary Annual for 1832, pp.202-232, edited by C. F. Edgar, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Browne & Greene, 1832.
Collected as "The Chivalric Sailor" in Sedgwick, Tales and Sketches, pp.237-78, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1835.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Document
1826
A Winter's Tale
Antigua
Atlantic Souvenir
Bacchus
British colonies
Canton
Cape May
Catholic
Chesapeake Bay
China
Cowes
cross-dressing
disguise
Dolph Heilegher
Don Juan Canto II
Ecclesiastes 9:11
Elk River
England
Gravesend
Haverstraw Bay
Henry IV Part I
Hermione
Historical fiction
Hong merchants
Hudson River
indenture
Isle of Wight
John Paul Jones (1747-1792)
Lord Byron
Maryland
Oliver Goldsmith
Pasha
Perdita
Philadelphia
plantation
Pope
Redwood: A Tale
Revolutionary War
Rodomontade novels
Romance novels
sailing
sailors
sentimentality
servants
Shakespeare
shipwreck
Sir Oracle
Sir Toby Blech
Sir Walter Scott
slavery
St. Kitts
Storm
tears
Thames River
The Heart of Midlothian
The Merchant of Venice
Twelfth Night
Washington Irving
West Indies