Tales of the Chesapeake Part 9

As this story had proceeded toward its final portions, the young man had detached himself from his father's arms. When Judge Whaley concluded in the darkness he waited in vain for a response. The old man lighted the lamp and peered about the room wistfully. Perry was gone.

That night, in the happiness of her engagement, Marion Voss had a glad unrest, which her mother noticed. "Dear," said the mother, "let us go over to the Methodist church. It is one of their protracted meetings or revivals, as they call it. If Perry comes he will know where to find us, as I will leave word."

The Methodists were second in social standing, but a wide gap separated them from the slave-holding and family aristocracy, who were Episcopalians. The sermon was delivered by one of their most powerful proselytizers, an old man in a homespun suit, high shoulders, lean, long figure, and glittering eyes. He was a wild kind of orator, striking fear to the soul, dipping it in the fumes of d.a.m.nation, lifting it thence to the joys of heaven. Terrible, electrical preaching! It was the product of uncultured genius and human disappointment. Marion sat in awe, hardly knowing whether it was impious or angelic. In a blind exordium the old zealot commanded those who would save their souls to walk forward and kneel publicly at the altar, and make their struggle there for salvation.

The first whom Marion saw to walk up the dimly lighted aisle and kneel was Perry Whaley. All in the church saw and knew him, and a thunderous singing broke out, in which religious and mere denominational zeal all threw their enthusiasm.

"Judge Whaley's son--Episcopalian--admitted to the bar to-day--wonderful!"

Marion heard these whispers on every hand; and as the singing ceased, and the congregation knelt to pray, Marion's mother saw her turning very pale, and silently and un.o.bserved led her out of the meeting-house.

It was one o'clock in the morning when Judge Whaley heard Perry enter the door. He was preceded by the beams of a lamp, as his step came almost trippingly up the stairs. The Judge looked up and saw the face of his demon, streaked with recent tears and shaded with dishevelled hair, but on it a look like eternal sunshine.

"Glory! glory! glory!" exclaimed the young man hoa.r.s.ely. He rushed upon his aged friend, and kissed him in an ecstacy almost violent.

"My boy! Perry! What is it? You are not out of your mind?"

"No! no! I have found my father, our father!"

"Who is it?" asked the Judge, with a rising superst.i.tion, as if this were not his orphan, but its preternatural copy; "you have found your father? What father?"

"G.o.d!" exclaimed young Perry, his countenance like flame. "My father is G.o.d and He is love!"

The town of Chester and the whole country had now a serious of rapid sensations. Judge Whaley and his son were turned lunatics, and behaved like a pair of boys. Marion Voss had broken her engagement with Perry Whaley because he insisted that he was not the Judge's son. Young Perry was exhorting in the Methodist church, and studying and starving himself to be a preacher. The Methodists were wild with social and denominational triumph: the Episcopalians were outraged, and meditated sending Perry to the lunatic asylum. Finally, to the great joy of nervous people, the last sensation came--Perry Whaley had left Chester to be a preacher.

Judge Whaley now grew old rapidly, and meek and careless of his attire. In an old pair of slippers, glove-less and abstracted, he crossed the court-house green, no longer the first gentleman in the county in courteous accost and lofty tone. He read his Bible in the seclusion of his own house, and fishermen on the river coming in after midnight saw the lamp-light stream through the c.h.i.n.ks of his shutters, and said: "He has never been the same since Perry went away." But he read in the religious papers of the genius and power of the absent one, roving like a young hermit loosened, and with a tongue of flame over the length and breadth of the country, producing extraordinary excitement and adding thousands to his humble denomination.

On Christmas Day the Judge was sitting in his great room reading the same mystic book, and listening, with a wistfulness that had never left him, to every infrequent footfall in the street. There came a knock at the door. He opened it, and out of the darkness into which he could not see came a voice altered in pitch, but with remembered accents in it, saying:

"Father, mother has come home!"

Stepping back before that extraordinary salutation, Judge Whaley saw a man come forward leading a woman by the hand. The Judge receded until he could go no farther, and sank into his chair. The woman knelt at his feet; older, and grown gray and in the robes of humility, yet in countenance as she had been, only purified, as it seemed, by suffering and repentance, he saw his wife of more than twenty years before.

Looking up into the face of the son he had watched so long for, the old man saw a still more wonderful transformation. The elegant young gentleman of a few months before was a living spectre, his bright eyes standing out large and consumptive upon a transparent skin, and glittering with fanaticism or excitement.

"Perry Whaley," said the woman firmly, but with sweetness, "it is twenty-two years since I left this house with hate of me in your heart and a degraded name; I was in thought and act a pure woman, though the evidence against me was mountain-high. My sin was that of many women--flirtation. Nothing more, before my G.o.d! I trifled with one of your students, a reckless and hot-blooded man, and inspired him with a tyrannous pa.s.sion. He swore if I would not fly with him to destroy me.

One day, the most dreadful of my life, he heard your foot upon the stairs ascending to my chamber, and threw himself into it before you and avowed himself your injurer. Then rose in confirmation of him every girlish folly; I saw myself in your mild eyes condemned, in this community long suspected, and by my own family discarded for your sake. Where could I go but to the author of my sorrows? He became my husband and I am a widow."

Judge Whaley stretched out his hand in the direction of his eyes, not upon the old wife at his feet, but toward his son, who had settled into a chair and closed his eyes as if in tired rapture.

"Hear me but a moment more," said the kneeling woman. "I was the slave of an ever-jealous maniac; but my heart was still at this fireside with your bowed spirit, and this our son. My husband told me that the way to recover the child was to claim it as his. His motive, I fear, was different--to place me on record as confessedly false and prevent our reunion forever. But I was not wise enough to see it. I only thought you would send my son to me. I waited in my lonely home in Charleston years on years. He came at last, but not too late; my frivolous soul, grown selfish with vanity and disappointment, bent itself before G.o.d through the prayers of our son. I am forgiven, Perry Whaley. _I have felt it!_"

The old man did not answer, but strained his eyes upon his son. "See there!" he slowly spoke, "Perry is dying. Famished all these years for human love, this excess of joy has snapped the silver cord. Wife, Mary, we have martyred him."

It was the typhoid fever which had developed from Perry's wasting vitality. He sank into delirium as they looked at him, and was carried tenderly to his bed. Marion Voss came to nurse him with his mother.

She, too, after Perry's departure, had grown serious and followed his example, and was a Methodist. The young zealot sank lower and lower, despite science or prayers. Both churches prayed for him. Negroes and whites united their hopes and kind offices. One morning he was of dying pulse, and the bell in the Episcopal church began to toll. At the bedside all the little family had instinctively knelt, and Perry's mother was praying with streaming eyes, committing the worn-out nature to Heavenly Love, when suddenly Judge Whaley, who had kept his hand on Perry's pulse, exclaimed:

"It beats! He lives again. The stimulant, Marion!"

Father and son had rescued each other's lives. One day as Perry had recovered strength, Judge Whaley said:

"My son, are you a minister, qualified to perform marriages?"

"Yes."

"When you are ready and strong, will you marry your mother and me again?"

"Very soon," said Perry; "but not too soon. Here is Marion waiting for me, as she has waited, like Rachel for Jacob, these many years. I shall preach no more, dear father, except as a layman. I see by your eyes that the demon is no longer in our home, and the remainder of my life will be spent in returning to you the joy my presence for years dispelled."

"O Perry, my patient son," exclaimed the father, "they who entertain angels unawares have nothing to look to with regret--except unkindness."

A CONVENT LEGEND.

The General Moreau, that pure republican, Who won at Hohenlinden so much glory, And by Bonaparte hated, crossed the sea to be free.

And brought to the Delaware his story.

World-renowned as he was, unto Washington he strayed.

Where Pichegru, his friend, had contended, And to Georgetown he rode, in search of a church, To confess what of good he offended.

The Jesuits' nest beckoned up to the height Where pious John Carroll had laid it, And the General knelt at the cell but to tell His offence; yet or ever he said it, A voice in the speech of his Bretagny home, From within, where the monk was to listen, Exclaimed like a soldier: "Ah me! _mon ami_, Take my place and a sinful one christen!

"For mine was the band that brought exile to you; Cadoudal, the Chouan, my master, Broke my sword and my heart, and I lost when I crost, Both honor and love to be pastor.

A knight of the king and my lady at court, At the call of Vendee the despised, Into Paris I stole with a few, one or two, As a.s.sa.s.sins, to murder disguised.

"On the third of Nivose, in the narrowest street, And never a traitor one to breathe it, We prepared to blow up Bonaparte with a cart, And a barrel of powder beneath it.

He came like a flash, dashing by, but behind, Poor folks and his escort in feather, And the child that we put, _sans_ remorse, by the horse, Were torn all to pieces together."

"To the guillotine both of my comrades were sent, But the Church, saving me for the tonsure, Hid me off in the wilds, and my dame, to her shame, To be _Pere_ sold me out from a _Monsieur_; And now she is clad in the silk of the court, And I in the wool of confessor,-- Hate me not, ere hence you go, Jean Victor Moreau!

And with France be my fame's intercessor!"

"Limoelan! priest! is it you that I hear In this convent by Washington's river?

Ah! France, how thy children are hurled round the world, Like the arrows from destiny's quiver!

Take shrift for thy crime! Be thou pardoned with peace, Poor exile of Breton, my brother!"

And the cannon of Dresden Moreau gave release, The bells of the convent the other.

CRUTCH, THE PAGE.

I.--CHIPS.

The Honorable Jeems Bee, of Texas, sitting in his committee-room half an hour before the convening of Congress, waiting for his negro familiar to compound a julep, was suddenly confronted by a small boy on crutches.