Chapter 4

"The discovery and the trust embarrassed Minuit, but he had never denied the request of any man. His time, as his sign affirmed, was everybody's. Yet a thrill, a twang, a twinge of delicious fear passed through him now. He loved this girl dearly, but he feared to love at all. He had now both the parental and the womanly recognition, and his days were lonely even with his garrulous timepieces, but he felt a lonelier sense of the possibility of turning her affection to awe. Those queer legends of his birth, his affinity for fixed luminaries and motions, and his conscious knowledge that he stood in some way related to spheres and orbits, and the laws of revolution and period, had never disturbed his mind in its calculations. But if he did stand exceptional in these respects to his fellow-men, might another and a beloved one comprehend what he himself did not? Yet the kindly regard of his neighbors, the composure of a conscience well consulted, and the hope that he was worthy of human love, made him resolve to keep the captain's admonition, though he hoped the occasion to obey it might never arrive.

"In the absence of the good ship, however, love could not be deceived. It spoke in waitings and longings, and in tender glances and considerateness. She knew the rattle of his carriage-wheels, and he could feel her in the air like the breath of a beautiful day soon to appear in distance. Time, toward which he stood in such natural harmony, was dearer that it contained this passion and life more exquisite, and himself more questionable for it all.

"It was a stormy winter. Ships strewed the coast between Hatteras and Navesink, and the capes of the Delaware received many a tattered barque. The ice poured down and wedged itself between Reedy Island and the shores, and crushed to pieces many that had escaped the ocean gales. One night in a raging storm the door of Captain Lum's cabin was thrown open, and a sailor appeared fresh from the water. He bore in his hand a chronometer, which Minuit recognized in a moment, and he drew his arm for the first time around the maiden's form.

"'The Chirpland went down on Five Fathom Shoal, and the captain stood by her. He bade us return his chronometer, and say that he perished in the assurance that his daughter was left to the guidance of another fully as sure.'

"'My child,' said Minuit, 'I accept thee wholly, sharing thy griefs! Weep, but on the breast of one who loves thee!'

"The village of Christina rejoiced when its broad-faced, dimpled friend came home with a bride so fair and well-descended. They dressed the sign before his door with flowers. Only the groom wore an anxious face as he led her into his tidy home, now for the first time blessed with a mistress.

"The night of the nuptials came softly down, as nowhere else except upon the skies of the Delaware and Chesapeake, and Minuit was happy. The thrumming clocks in the shop below mingled their tones and tickings in one consonant chorus, scarcely heard above the long drone and low monotonies of the insects in the creeks and woods, which assisted silence. The husband slept, how well beloved he could not know.

"In the dreams of the night he was awakened. In the pale moonshine he saw his wife, clad in her garments of whiteness, standing by his bed all trembling.

"'Tell me,' she said, 'what it is that I hear? I have listened till I am afraid. As I lay in this room perfectly silent, with my head, my husband, nearest your heart, I felt the ticking of a watch. At first it was only curious and strange. Now it haunts me and terrifies me. I am a simple girl, new and nervous to this wedded life. Is this noise natural? What is it?'

"Minuit trembled also.

"'Lois, my bride, my heaven!' he said. 'Oh! pity me, who have tried to pity all and make all happy, if I cannot myself explain away the cause of your alarm. I have kept myself lonely these many years, aware that I was not like other men, but that my heart--no evil monitor to me--gave a different sound. There is nothing in its beat, my wife, to make you fear it. Return and lay your head upon it, and you will hear it say this only, if you listen with faith: _love_!'

"Thus the watch-maker turned superstition to assurance, and the admonition of his heart was a source of joy instead of fear to the listener at its side. It ticked a few bright years with constancy, and was the last benediction of the world to her ere she was ushered into that peace which passeth understanding.

"At the death of his wife Minuit felt a deeper sense of his responsibility to time, and the finite uses of it expanded to a cheerful conception of the infinite. The country round was generally settled by a religious people, and the many meeting-houses of different sects had his equal confidence and sympathy. Pursuing his craft with unwearied diligence, and delighting the homestead with his violin as of old, a more pensive and wistful expression replaced his smile, and love withdrawn beckoned him toward it beyond the boundaries of period. Hard populations, which would not listen to preachers, heard with delight the amiable warnings of this friendly man, and as his own generation grew older, a new race dawned to whom he appeared in the light of a pure-spirited evangelist. 'Improve the time! watch it! ennoble it! It is a part of the beautiful and perpetual circle of everlasting duty. It is to the great future only the little disk of a second-hand, traversed as swiftly, while the great rim of heaven accepts it as a part of the eternal round!' Such was the burden of his sermon.

"He could ride all along the roads, and hear his missionaries preaching for him wherever a clock struck, or a dial on the gable of a great stone barn propelled its shadows. His tracts were in every farmer's vest pocket. Whatever he made he consecrated with a paragraph of counsel.

"The old sign faded out. The clock-maker's sight grew dim, but his apprehensions of the everlasting love and occupation were clearer and more confident to the end.

"One day they found him in the graveyard of the London Tract, by the side of the spot where his wife was interred, worn and asleep at the ripe age of three-score.

"The mill teams and the farm wagons stopped in the road, and the country folks gathered round in silence.

"'Run down at last,' said one. 'If there are heavenly harps and bells, he hears them now!'"

And there they hear the ticking, the preaching of this faithful life, under the old stone, sending up its pleasant message yet. The stone is perishing like a broken crystal, but the memory of the diligent and useful man beneath it rings amongst the holy harmonies of the country. Though dead, he yet speaketh!

THE IMP IN NANJEMOY.

Dull in the night, when the camps were still, Thumped two nags over Good Hope Hill; The white deserter, the passing spy, Took to the brush as the pair went by; The army mule gave over the chase; The Catholic negro, hearing the pace, Said, as they splashed through Oxon Run: "Dey ride like de soldiers who speared God's Son!" But when Good Friday's bells behind Died in the capital on the wind, He who rode foremost paused to say: "Herold, spur up to my side, scared boy! A word has rung in my ears all day-- Merely a jingle, 'Nanjemoy.'"

"Ha!" said Herold, "John, why that's A little old creek on the river. Surratt's Lies just before us. You halt on the green While I slip in the tavern and get your carbine!" The outlaw drank of the whiskey deep, Which the tipsy landlord, half asleep, Brought to his side, and his broken foot He raised from the stirrup and slashed the boot. "Lloyd," he cried, "if some news you invite-- Old Seward was stabbed in his bed to-night. Lincoln _I_ shot--that long-lived fox-- As he looked at the play from the theatre box; And it seemed to me that the sound I heard, As the audience fluttered, like ducks round decoy, Was only the buzz of a musical word That I cannot get rid of--'Nanjemoy.'"

"Twenty miles we must ride before day, Cross Mattawoman, Piscataway, If in the morn we would take to the woods In the swamp of Zekiah, at Doctor Mudd's!" "Quaint are the names," thought the outlaw then, "Though much I have mingled with Maryland men! I have fever, I think, or my mind's o'erthrown. Though scraped is the flesh by this broken bone, Every jog that I take on this road so lonely, With thoughts, aye bloody, my mind to employ, I can but say, over and over, this only-- The drowsy, melodious 'Nanjemoy.'"

Silent they galloped by broken gates, By slashes of pines around old estates; By planters' graves afield under clumps Of blackjack oaks and tobacco stumps; The empty quarters of negroes grin From clearings of cedar and chinquopin; From fodder stacks the wild swine flew, The shy young wheat the frost peeped through, And the swamp owl hooted as if she knew Of the crime, as she hailed: "Ahoy! Ahoy!" And the chiming hoofs of the horses drew The pitiless rhythm of "Nanjemoy."

So in the dawn as perturbed and gray They hid in the farm-house off the way, And the worn assassin dozed in his chair, A voice in his dreams or afloat in the air, Like a spirit born in the Indian corn-- Immemorial, vague, forlorn, And disembodied--murmured forever The name of the old creek up the river. "God of blood!" he said unto Herold, As they groped in the dusk, lost and imperilled, In the oozy, entangled morass and mesh Of hanging vines over Allen's Fresh: "The chirp of birds and the drone of frogs, The lizards and crickets from trees and bogs Follow me yet, pursue and ferret My soul with a word which I used to enjoy, As if it had turned on me like a spirit And stabbed my ear with its 'Nanjemoy.'"

Ay! Great Nature fury or preacher Makes, as she wists, of the tiniest creature-- Arming a word, as it floats on the mind, With the dagger of wrath and the wing of the wind. What, though weighted to take them down, Their swimming steeds in the river they drown, And paddle the farther shore to gain, Chased by gunboats or lost in rain? Many a night they try the ferry And the days in haggard sleep employ, But every raft, or float, or wherry, Drifts up the tide to Nanjemoy.

"Ho! John, we shall have no more annoy, We've crossed the river from Nanjemoy. The bluffs of Virginny their shadows reach To hide our landing upon the beach!" Repelled from the manse to hide in the barn, The sick wretch hears, like a far-away horn, As he lies on the straw by the snoring boy, The winding echo of "N-a-n-j-e-m-o-y." All day it follows, all night it whines, From the suck of waters, the moan of pines, And the tread of cavalry following after, The flash of flames on beam and rafter, The shot, the strangle, the crash, the swoon, Scarce break his trance or disturb the croon Of the meaningless notes on his lips which fasten, And the soldier hears, as he seeks to convoy The dying words of the dark assassin, A wandering murmur, like "Nanjemoy."

THE FALL OF UTIE.

The reception at Secretary Flake's was at its height. Bland Van, the President of the nation, had departed with his boys; the punch-bowl had been emptied nine times; and still the cry from our republican society was, "Fill up!"

A pair of young men, unacquainted with each other, pressed at the same time to the punch-bowl, and Jack, the chief ladler, turning from the younger, a clerk in civil dress, helped the elder, a tall naval officer, to a couple of glasses. The clerk, young Utie, who was somewhat flushed, addressed the chief ladler and remarked:

"You dam nigger, didn't you see my glass?"

"See it, sah? Yes! I've seen it seval times afo, dis evening."

Black Jack then received the current allowance of curses for his color and his impudence, all of which he took meekly, till the officer, Lieutenant Dibdo, interrupted on the negro's behalf.

"It's none o' yo affair, I reckon!" cried Utie sullenly.

"The man had no intention of slighting you," said Dibdo. "You have been drinking too much, boy, and your coarseness is coming out."

A fresh crowd of thirsty people pressing up at this point gave Jack his opportunity to cry: "Room around de punch-bowl!"

And the disputants were separated and squeezed by the promenading tides into different rooms.

The officer presently forgot all about it, but not so young Utie, who was partly drunk, entirely vain, not a gentleman by nature, and outraged that anybody had dubbed him "a boy." He sought the side of a fine young girl, the daughter of the chief of the bureau where he was employed, and with whom he was in love. She was attired in the free costume of republican receptions--bare arms, a low dress giving ample display to the whitest shoulders in the room, and fine natural hair dressed with flowers. Every gentleman who passed her during the evening had looked his homage freely--old beaux, dignitaries, officers, foreign deputies, _roués_--and as she had been two or three winters in that kind of society, nothing discomposed her.

"Robert," she said, with part of a glance, as Utie rejoined her, "you go to the punch-bowl too much. You reflect upon me, sir. Besides, I heard you quarrelling with that handsome officer. I am dying to know him. Who is he?"

Utie looked viciously up, anger and jealousy inflaming his heated face, for, although he had no engagement with Miss Rideau, he conceived himself her future suitor. But some rash words that he said against the officer were scarcely heard by the self-possessed beauty of official society, because, just then, the young officer and a friend were approaching them. She dropped her eyes when she met Lieutenant Dibdo's bold glance of admiration, perhaps in order not to be privy to the more searching look with which, like a gentleman of the world, he ran over the fine points of her plump body as he passed. But young Utie, seeing the offender of a moment ago taking such ardent and leisurely survey of the girl under his care, turned pale with hate. The officer did not notice him at all, absorbed in the fine colors, eyes, and proportions of Miss Rideau, and this further outraged Utie who--to his credit be it said--had only modest thoughts for her. When he saw, however, that she looked after the manly figure and naval gilt of him of the profane eyes, as if to return his admiration, the intoxicated boy dropped an oath.

"I will horsewhip that powder-monkey!" he said.

"Robert," said the girl placidly, "you won't. You have no horse and no horsewhip, but you have been drinking. Go from me, sir! Some one else shall see me home to-night."

"I will kill the man who takes my place! Do you dare to speak that way to me?"

He had raised his voice, in his rage, so that some others heard it. There was a little pause of pressing people, for that was a chivalrous age as to the manner of men to women, and the young officer, just then returning, availed himself of a pretty girl's dilemma to say:

"May I assist you, miss? I presume you are not in very agreeable company."

"Thank you, sir," answered Miss Rideau. "I would be obliged to have some one find my aunt for me; she is here somewhere."

"Will you accept a stranger's arm?"

"In this misfortune, I will."

Dibdo took off the pretty girl, and one of his naval companions, looking after him, exclaimed, "What a genius Dib. is with the ladies!" But the companion, feeling a trembling, unsteady hand upon his arm, turned about and met young Utie's desperate face. "I want to know the name of that fellow!" said Utie.

"That is Charles Dibdo," said the naval companion, "lieutenant of the United States frigate Fox, and I recommend you, my boy, to address _him_ in a civil tone. For me, I never mind a drunken man."

Thoroughly demonized now, young Robert Utie turned blindly about for some implement of revenge. He found it in Tiltock, a fellow-clerk, a novitiate and a ninny, who was visible in the crowd.

"Tiltock, are you a man of honor?"

"I hope so, Bob."

"Can you carry a challenge?"

"Oh yes! I guess so, to 'blige a ole friend."

"Can you write it?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Then take it by word of mouth. That scoundrel there, Lieutenant Dibdo, has insulted a lady, and me too. I must have his blood. Follow him up, and meet me at Gadsby's with his answer."

Full of self-importance at this first and safe opportunity to stand upon what is known as "the field of honor," Tiltock kept the lieutenant in his eye, and took him finally aside and demanded a meeting in the name of Utie. The naval officer answered that he had simply relieved a lady from a drunken boy; but Tiltock, in the dramatic way common to halcyon old times, refused to accept either "drunken" or "boy" as terms appropriate to "the code," and pressed for an answer. In five minutes the naval officer replied, through his naval companion, that having ascertained Mr. Utie to be a gentleman's son, and he as an United States officer not being able to decline a challenge, the latter was accepted. The weapons were to be pistols, the place the usual ground at Bladensburg, and the time the afternoon of the next day.

There was a good deal of drinking and boasting at the hotels that night, Utie and Tiltock telling everybody, as a particular secret, that there was to be "an 'fah honah," otherwise a "juel," at "Bladensburg, sah!" The gin-drinking, cock-fighting, sporting element of the town was aroused, and Utie and Tiltock were invited on all sides to imbibe to the significant toast of "The Field." Very noisy, very insolent, nuisances indeed, these two mere lads--the offspring of a vain and ignorant social period of which some elements yet remain--borrowed the money to hire a carriage, and at midnight they set out with some associates by the old, rutty, clay road for the Maryland village of Bladensburg. That night they caroused until Nature, despite her revolt, put them to bed. In the morning, with a swollen and sallow face, dry hair, unsteady hands, aching eyes and dim vision, Robert Utie awoke to the recollection of his folly and his rashness, and he realized the critical period which he had provoked. His clerkship lost, his self-pride poignant, his pockets nearly empty, his respectable career irretrievably terminated, his sweetheart insulted, and his life in danger! There was no escape either from despair or fate. Tiltock was strutting about below stairs with a drunken old doctor, misnamed a surgeon, who deposited behind the bar a rusty case of surgical instruments, and who took a deep potation to the toast of "The fawchuns of waw." The Bladensburg people were well aware of the occasion, and the old tavern was surrounded by loafers and gossips, many of whom were boys who had walked out from the city as we go to prize-fights in our day. To fill up the time a dog-fight and a chicken-fight were improvised by the enterprising stable-boys in the back yard, on the green slopes of the running Branch. While Tiltock strutted out of town at an imposing pace to examine "The Field," Robert Utie retired to his room, sought with an emetic to relieve his stomach, and then sat down to write some letters and an epitaph. The paper was thin, and the pen and ink matched it, but the drunken boy's eyes marred more than all; for suddenly the secret fountains of his lost youth were touched as by the prick of his pen, and the drops gushed out upon the two words he had written:

"Dear mother--"

Not his sweetheart, who was nothing to him now; not his "honor," which had been only vain-glory and deceit; not any thing but this earliest, everlasting faith which is ours forever, whether we be steadfast or go astray: the tie of home, of childhood, and of our mother's prayer and kiss--this was the soft reproach which glided between a wasted youth and the "field of valor" he had tempted. He wept. He sobbed. He threw himself upon the bed, and pressing his temples into the ragged quilt, felt the panorama of childhood pass across his mind like something cool, sorrowful, and compassionate. The sickness _she_ had cured, the bad words _she_ had taken from his undutiful lips, the whipping she had saved him from at the cost of her deceit, the lie she had never told _him_, the tears he had found her shedding upon her knees when first he had been drinking, the money he had never given her out of his salary but had spent with idlers, his ruined soul which to that mother's thought was pure as a baby's still, and watched by all the angels of God: these were admonitions from the green meadows of childhood. Before was the barren field of honor.

How short is the struggle betwixt youth and selfishness, that sum of all diseases and crimes; that selfishness out of which wars arise and hell is habitated!

A poor, overworked Christian negro, a slave in the tavern, hearing the sobbing of Robert Utie and aware that one of the duellists occupied that room, lifted the latch, and wakened the wretched boy from his remorse.

"Young moss," he said, "doan you fight no juels! Oh! doan do it, for de bressed Lord's sake! It's nuffin but pride and sin. Yo's only a pore, spilt boy, but you got a soul, young moss! Doan you go git kilt in dat ar bloody gully wha' so many gits hurt amoss to deff!"

Utie arose from the dream of home, and kicked the poor slave out of the room. He then drank, speculated upon his chances, practised with an imaginary pistol at the wall, and meditated running away, alternately, until Tiltock's business-step rang in the hall.

"Bob," he said, "we've picked you a beautiful piece of ground, and the other party's waiting. It's the most popular juel of the season."

They walked up the sandy village street, under the old hip-roofed houses, crossed the Branch bridge, and proceeded a quarter of a mile on the road to Washington. There, where a rivulet crossed the road amongst some bushes, they descended by a path into a copse, and on to a green meadow-space cleared away by former rain freshets. Farm boys, town boys, and intruders of all sorts were lurking near. The field of honor resembled a gypsy camp.

Lieutenant Dibdo's companion came up to Tiltock and said that his friend did not wish to fight, and would make any manly apology, even though unconscious of offence, if the challenge was withdrawn. The crowd was ardent for the fight, and Tiltock, who was punctilious about honor, particularly where he could cut a safe figure, repelled the compromise, as "unwarranted by the code." He knew as much about the code as about honor, and more about both than about getting a living.

"Then," said the lieutenant, "I am authorized to say that my principal will take Mr. Utie's first fire. Let him improve the generous chance as he will. The second time we will make business of it."

The interlopers fell back. The word was given: "Ready--Aim--Fire!" Robert Utie, sustained by braggadocio, that quality which makes murderers die on the scaffold heroically, fired full at the body of Lieutenant Dibdo. That officer fired into the air and remained unmoved and unharmed.

"Is another shot demanded?"

"Yes," said Tiltock, "our honor is not yet satisfied."

He waved the crowd back in an imperious way--they having rushed in after the first shot--and he gave the word himself like a dramatic reading.