CHAPTER I.

THE SECRET OF THE BIG ROCK.

In the spring of 185-- I was head bookkeeper and confidential clerk of a Cincinnati firm, having a large trade with the Cotton States. I had an adored wife, and two fine children, who were our pride and our delight. Not ambitious for wealth, I was perfectly satisfied if my endeavors conduced to the prosperity of my employers. My salary was sufficient for our wants. None of us had ever been sick and the family physician was rather a friend than an adviser. The firm was prosperous; my employers, always kind and considerate; my modest home was cheerful, and I believed myself the happiest of men.

Cholera was that year prevalent, and toward the first of June, threatened to become epidemic in our city. My employers hurried with their families to the country, leaving me in full charge of the house. Continuous immunity from sickness, made my wife and myself so confident, that had we been able to strike the sign of the passover on our door posts, we would scarcely have thought the precaution necessary. Even the dread scourge, cholera, had few terrors for us.

Going home one Saturday afternoon, I read on the Bulletin Board of a newspaper office, that the physicians believed Cincinnati had passed the crisis; that no epidemic need be feared. I had a habit, when walking alone, of whistling softly. Near my house a neighbor smiled, as he said, "he was glad to see my mouth in so fine a pucker, for it spoke well of the day." My wife met me at the door, as usual, but told me she felt quite sick; seeing my face become clouded, she assured me it was not much, and laughingly repeated a witty speech of our little girl. Hardly had she finished, when she almost screamed with pain. In twenty-four hours, she was a corpse; and Monday, at noon, I was wifeless and childless.

I did not pray to die, believing that God knew and did what was best for his children; but I would have greeted with a smile the grim monster, had he reached out his hand for me.

In two days I was at my desk, for there were important matters to be attended to. The necessity for work, kept me from falling by the wayside. My mother had taught me, "that man's highest duty is, to do his duty." This saying had been adopted as my motto.

The next week, my employers returned to town, and ordered me to Fort Mackinaw for a couple of months' vacation, presenting me with a thousand dollar check, to cover my expenses. Two months between the Island and the Soo were passed in fishing, with such benefits resulting, that the excursion has been renewed whenever an absolute necessity for a change has been felt.

My employers on my return, seeing the good effects upon me, of the water and the rod, presented me with a nice skiff, telling me to take every Thursday afternoon for a holiday, and to keep them supplied with fish for Friday; at the same time, kindly informing me, that a plate would always be at one or the other of their tables for me to help enjoy my catch.

Being a man of almost machine like habits of regularity, my boat was always seen on the proper afternoon, rain or shine, during the fishing seasons for several years.

It was in '58 that I accidentally threw my line in a deep pool or hole, in the Licking river, a mile or two from the Ohio, and almost immediately struck a fine gaspergou perch, or as the people in Kentucky called it, a "New Light." This fish was first seen in the state, when the forerunners of the present Cambellite, or Christian church, the "New Lights," were creating much enthusiasm in the Kentucky religious world.

The catch was followed by several others, when a terrible splashing was made close to my hook by an out-rigger rowed by a stalwart negro. The Ethiopian scowled upon me as he shot by. In a few moments he returned and caught a _crab_, letting an oar back water about the same place on his run down stream. The disturbance drove all the fish from the locality; at least I had no more bites.

The two following Thursdays, I tried the same pool, but my darkey was again rowing about the ground, and no fish were to be had.

About a month later, there was a press of business at the store. At the request of our senior to forego my usual holiday, I worked all Thursday afternoon, with the understanding I was to take the next day and bring in my fish for Friday's supper. I started early and rowed some distance up the Licking, to what were considered good fishing grounds. In passing the spot where my sport had been twice disturbed, I saw the outrigger handled by the sable oarsman, while a handsome young man in the stern drew up a fine black bass. The negro again scowled at me.

I reached my ground, and was having but indifferent success, when almost without a ripple the outrigger drew up close to my side.

"What luck?" demanded the gentleman, in a clear, sweetly modulated voice, which made me for a minute forget the colored man's evident ill will.

"Rather poor; nothing to what I was enjoying four weeks ago, before your boat drove all the fish away from the hole where I saw you an hour ago. I have a notion your man had a method in his madness."

The gentleman laughed a laugh so breezy and cheery, that it drew me at once to him.

"Yes, Jim told me of his exploit, and we have come up to invite you back to "_our hole_" as he calls it."

I could not refuse an offer so cordially extended.

The gentleman as we gently floated down the stream informed me, that Jim had selected "our hole" as one little likely to attract Cincinnati Waltons, and regularly every Friday left in it a fine feed for fish; that Jim was almost amphibious and seemed to know how to draw the finny denizens of the river to whatever spot he selected and at fixed times; that he was surprised to learn I had found fish in the place on Thursday, when there should have been none until Friday; that the sable conjuror was not so much put out, because I had found the spot, as because the fish had lost their reckoning and were a day ahead of time.

"I am supposed to be Jim's boss," he smilingly went on, "but in fact, on the water, am governed by Jim; his rod is one of iron."

At "our hole" we lay to, and in an hour had a fine mess of bass and new lights--as many as we needed.

Felden was the name my new acquaintance gave me as his--"Jack Felden" he said, "and this coon is Jim Madison."

Jim grinned and was the very personification of the free and easy, yet servile southern "body servant."

Mr. Felden said, "I make it a rule, Mr. Jamison, never to kill a single fish I can not consume either myself or through a few friends, to whom I now and then send a mess. The poor things have a right to their pursuit of life, health and happiness, and should not be killed in wanton love of killing. As one of the dominant animals of this earth, I claim the right to take fish for my uses. I enjoy the sport of angling; but when enough are caught the sport ends, and I reel in my line, and silently steal away."

"You are a sportsman of my own kidney," I rejoined, "we have enough."

Jim then emptied a pail of fish feed into the river, saying:

"Dey'll guzzle all dat afore dark, and termorrer dey'll come here and find nuthin', and dey'll go away, but shuah as death and 'ligeon dey'll be back here nex' Friday. Dis niggah skeert em de las' fo' weeks, a Thursdays."

Jim grinned in my face as he said this, and I was forced to commend his prudence, though it had been at my cost.

The following Thursday, I tried the hole, but Jim was right; no fish took my bait; he was seen, however, scudding along in Felden's outrigger. He grinned at me and asked, "how is _de hole_?"

The following week, to my gratification, I found Mr. Felden on the river. We fished at "our hole" with some success: Jim then fed the fish, while his master informed me that he had concluded to go shares with me. Hereafter, he would meet me on Thursday, so as to enable me to gratify the Catholic appetites of my employers. Thus he would have the pleasure of bettering our acquaintance. He paid me the compliment of saying that he had circled the globe, associating with men in all lands, and felt we ought to be friends.

Our friendship grew into intimacy, before the season was over. He invited me to _his den_. It was a plain cottage, externally; but within sumptuous; skins of lions, tigers, leopards of every variety of spots, and of other animals covering the floors of hard wood at that time rarely seen. Several of the pelts, he said, were the trophies of his own skill with the rifle. The walls were tapestried with rare draperies, and rugs, all of them valuable souvenirs of Eastern lands. One room was given up to cabinets, in which curios and objects de vertu sparkled in oriental beauty. All was arranged with rare taste. I hinted to my host, that his house was a temptation to the burglar. He went to the door and whistled gently. In rushed two fine dogs; noble specimens of monster mastiffs.

"These are my guardians. Woe to the thief that gets into this house; if he escapes Jim and me, these fellows would tear him into fish bait. Wouldn't you my Mogul?" One of the huge mastiffs sprang up with a growl that startled me.

"Now Akbar! you and Queen salute this gentleman. He is my friend and must be yours."

The two dogs came up to me, smelt all about me, then one of them laid a great paw in my lap, while the other put both feet on my shoulders, yawning mightily in my face showed fangs long enough and strong enough to give the king of the forest no mean battle.

I spent a charming evening with my new friend, and found him one I could gladly call such.

During the following winter, I dined with Jack--I had accepted his request to address him thus familiarly--at least one day in each week. His dinners were at the then unusual hour of seven, a habit acquired as he informed me in India. Jim was butler, and Dinah, his wife was cook. She was an artist of a kind to be found nowhere in the world, outside of old southern plantation halls. The table service was of pure china and cut glass. The menu was never extensive, thereby not conducing to over-indulgence, but everything was perfect of its kind, and cooked absolutely to a "T". A single bottle of wine was always served for us two, either of Rhine or one of the best clarets. My host and I never emptied more than two glasses each. At the end of each meal, Dinah and Jim came in as the table was being cleared off, and drank to our healths in glasses of the same set, and from the same wine used by the master.

Mr. Felden never smoked cigars at table, but we each had a jasmine Turkish pipe and puffed delicious Ladikiyah, received by him from Beyrout in hermetically sealed cans.

One evening when we were lolling back on softest chairs and enjoying to our full the fragrant weed, Jack said to me, "Paul," (this was the first and almost the only time, he thus called me,) "you have told me the sad, sweet story of your life. I propose, if you wish, to give you mine."

"I am very glad of it, and have been hoping you would."

For some minutes he was silent, and his noble face was lighted with what seemed an illumination from within, wholly different from that laid upon it by the mellow glow from the candelabra.

"I am thirty years old; have light auburn and very curly hair." I started, for his hair and beard were dark brown, almost black, and without even a wave. Without noticing my surprise, he continued, "My complexion is florid and my face without a scar."

"My goodness, Jack, you are making sport of me," I cried, for the man before me had a complexion of richest olive, and a terrible scar had been cut across his cheek, as he once laughingly intimated, by a tiger's claw.

"No, I am telling you simple facts. I am the son of a rich planter in ----," he did not name the state; "my father and my uncle owned adjoining estates of great value, and were as proud as they were rich. I was an only child. My uncle had but one, and that a daughter. Our parents inherited their fortunes from my grandfather, and at an early date they determined to unite the family wealth again by a marriage between my cousin Belle and myself. She was a pure blonde, one year my senior, very stately, very cold, and intensely proud. We grew up to consider ourselves as indissolubly betrothed. Belle treated it as calmly as if we had been married for years. This she did as soon as she was out of the school room. She never seemed to doubt the propriety of our engagement. She loved 'Clifton' and 'Brandon'--I will thus call the two plantations--she loved the two estates next to her father. Him she worshipped. These two loves filled her soul, and left no room for any other genuine affection. Yes; she loved herself, our name, our lineage, and her pride."

For awhile he was silent, and his soul seemed to be working in his face; then, with a sigh of pain, he continued:

"I graduated from one of the best colleges in the land at twenty, and at once with a learned tutor, was sent abroad. We traveled in continental Europe for a few months and I was intensely happy. Before the first year had half ran out, we were summoned home. My father was ill, and would probably not live to see me. This was my first great pain, for my mother had died at my birth. We hurried to New York by the first steamer, then by rail and coach we flew southward without having heard a word from home. We were too late; my poor father had been dead nearly a fortnight. I had loved him with intense devotion.

My uncle having died three years before, Belle had been living since then with my father at Clifton. She met me at the door, enveloped in black, and looking the very embodiment of decorous grief. She kissed me on the forehead, and when within told me in a voice as calm as ice of my poor father's last illness, of his death, and of the immensely attended funeral. She opened her writing desk, read letter after letter of condolence, and with a fitting sigh spoke of the gratification we should feel, 'that dear uncle had so many admirers among the best people of the south.' Her well-poised calmness nearly stifled me. Yearning for love and sympathy, all I received from the only relative I had on earth, at least of near degree, were congratulations that my father had found in death the cold esteem of friends.

As soon as I could decently leave the house, I hurried to the negro quarters to see my foster mother, Dinah, and her husband, Jim. There I found loving hearts, and for many minutes was clasped in the arms of her who had nursed me on her bosom through my babyhood. I lay upon a settee, given Dinah by myself as a Christmas present years before, and with my head on the old negress' lap, let her comb the hair over my aching brow. Soothed and rested by the kind, homely sympathy, I lay with closed eyes, when the cabin became redolent of that peculiar odor given out by genuine crepe, and Belle walked in. In calm, cold words she said she was sorry John could not find some one at the house to brush his head.

The next day my cousin handed me a letter, 'the last,' she said 'Uncle had ever written.' It told me where I would find his will; that everything he possessed was left to me, and asked, as a dying request, that I should marry my cousin the day I became twenty-one. He told me how all the love he had borne my mother had been centered upon me; gave me a few words of advice, but said he felt advice unnecessary, as he knew how good his only son was.

When I had finished reading I handed the letter to Belle, saying there was something in it concerning her. I watched her through my fingers and saw that her reading was simply perfunctory; she had evidently read it before. She sighed, came to my seat, put her arms about my neck--called me her dear John, and kissed me on the lips. I felt like one fettered and powerless. My heart was filled with a sort of numbness--despair. Two facts were as clear to me as daylight: that I did not love my cousin, that she did not love me; she was incapable of real passion. I turned to her and said:

'Belle you have read my father's letter, what do you suggest?'

'Why, of course, John, we will be married on the 20th day of February. We have a month to get ready, besides we need not much preparation, for we will at once go to Europe for a year, until the sad events of the past few weeks shall have been obliterated from our minds.'

Good God! she could speculate on the death of grief. I hated her. But I would as soon have thought of exhuming my father's body and scattering it to the four winds of heaven, as to think of not obeying his wishes.

Well, we were married, and at once went abroad. I tried to and did respect my wife. She attracted great attention, for she was superbly beautiful--queenly. But there was never a moment when I felt like pressing her stately form to my breast; never had the slightest inclination to kiss her lips; never once felt I could look into her great blue eyes, and breathe out my life on her bosom.

A marble statue would as quickly have aroused a feeling of passion in my heart. She was cold and did not seem to realize that I was not a model husband, for I was her attentive and watchful companion. She seemed thoroughly satisfied, while my heart was hardening into stone.

In July we visited a flower show in Regent's Park, accompanied by two English ladies, both married, romantic and full of sentiment. In our rounds, we met a lady in company with a gentleman and a little boy. She was about eighteen years old, with dark melting eyes under a perfectly arched brow, and a broad low forehead, over which her black hair was banded in massive silken waves. Her complexion was so deeply brunette as to be almost olive. The blood was rich and flowing in her cheeks, and her lips were two full ripe riven cherries, when she spoke parting over large pearly teeth. Her head was exquisitely poised on shoulders of superb mould, and her form and gait queenly. We were on the opposite side of a wonderful erica admiring its masses of pink flowers. Our eyes met. I stood as if spell bound. I had never before seen a perfect beauty and all of my own chosen type. She was exactly my opposite, I, high florid; she intensely brunette.

The color came into her cheek and mounted to her very hair when she caught my fixed gaze. One of our English friends noticed this. Afterwards in our walks, we met again and again the lady in the brown shawl--for so our friends called her. Whenever we met, my eyes instinctively sought those of the unknown, and always caught her glance in return, and at every such encounter her face crimsoned. This was remarked by our two lady friends and caused them to banter me. They told my wife to be on her guard; that if I were not already married, they would say I had certainly met my fate.

Ah! little did they dream they were speaking truth--that this girl was my fate for weal or for woe! I heard the unknown's voice several times without catching her words. It sank into my very soul. I became absent minded throughout the remainder of the day. Belle joined the ladies in declaring that the "brown shawl" had bewitched me.

Mr. Jamison, I have a very decided theory of true marriage. The Bible is a mass of oriental rubbish! Forgive me, I do not mean to offend. I reverence the bible, but not every word of it. It is made up of ingots of gold covered and almost hidden within masses of sand--grains of truth and Godly wisdom, in bulks of chaff. It is made up of God's wisdom and oriental fable legend and poetry. You reverence the gold, the grains--the sands and the chaff. I wash out the sand, and pick out the gold; winnow away the chaff, and gather up the rich grains.

Nothing to me in the book of Genesis, reveals more deep knowledge of human nature, than the account of the creation of Adam; he was made from the dust of the ground, and his soul was breathed into him by the breath of God. When a man dies, his body returns to the dust, his soul goes back to its maker. God created man! male and female, created he _them_! They were then good. He afterward separated the female from the male. Each thus became imperfect--each became a part and not a whole. There is a constant yearning in them for reunion. When the true Eve unites with her Adam, they become one, and their union is bliss. When so united, no man shall put them asunder. The union is founded directly on natural and, not on moral or religious laws. The natural laws speak within, and draw irresistibly two hearts to be mated. Whoever obeys the impulse find a Heaven on earth. Others, falsely-mated, may not find absolute misery, but, it is equally certain, true happiness is never theirs. Men and women are made for each other; not one man for one certain woman, but in classes. A man finds his physical mate in one of a certain class. If her moral qualities be not fitted by education, he should wait with a well grounded hope of finding another in the same class, whose bringing up will have better fitted her for him.

Now, the woman in the _brown shawl_ was my mate, that is one of the proper class. I could not get her out of my mind, and my wife's coldness, constantly made me yearn for her. Travel was distasteful to Belle, so that before the fall had set in, we were again at home. I did not love my wife, she did not love me. She was fully satisfied to live with me in the proud dignity given us by our vast estates.

Besides his plantation, negroes and stock, my father had left me largely over a hundred thousand dollars in money and convertible bonds and mortgages. I resolved to turn all of these into cash, and to abandon wife and country. I got all in readiness; executed and left with my lawyers papers conveying every thing else to Belle; went to New York on some pretended business and sailed for Europe, writing home that I would never return. I sought the American colonies and hotels in every country, in a sort of vague hope that I could find the woman in the brown shawl. She was my fate. I was mad with the one idea. I was no libertine, Mr. Jamison. I simply yearned for her, not asking what the result would be should she be found. I drifted into the East and wandered through Russia, Turkey, Greece, Palestine and Egypt. I did not meet her; and could get no tidings of her.