The Iron Game Part 46

"No, father." Kate had heard all this before, but she, for the first time, resolved upon setting her father right. "No, Jack hasn't a particle of the feeling you ascribe to him. I don't think he liked poor Wesley. They were totally unlike in nature, and I think that Jack felt deeply that he had been wronged by Wesley's appointment. But it was not in his nature to seek revenge. He would have fought Wesley openly, but he would never be one of a gang of murderers. I think I can see how Jack was led into the part he played. It does not lessen the guilt, but it relieves him of the odious suspicions I first felt."

Then Boone, in irritable impatience, reminded her of her own earlier utterances; how from his first coming Wesley had been treated with studied distrust; how he had been denied the boyish intimacy that existed between Jack and d.i.c.k; how he was insensibly made to feel that he was in the house under a different cartel from that of Jack and d.i.c.k; that he was a prisoner on parole, and his word was doubted. Nothing could make him believe, he declared, getting up moodily, but that the whole lot of them had set out to drive Wesley into a corner and then kill him, as they had done.

Kate sighed wearily as her father left the room. If she could only be as well a.s.sured as her strong words implied! Ah! if she could fetch back her lover by getting at the truth, how willingly she would fly to Rosedale and learn all! But she dared not question, lest questioning should confirm, where she now at least had the miserable solace of doubt. Could it be true? Could Jack be the base schemer her father depicted him? Then her mind ran back to Rosedale. She lived again all the enchanting days of that earthly paradise. She saw Wesley's furtive starts, his strange disappearances, his growing melancholy, his moody reticence when she questioned him. Ah! if he had but confided to her! If she had but dreamed of the desperate purpose born of the loneliness he lived in! If Jack had been loyal to him, loyal to her, Wesley would have been warned that eager eyes were upon him, ready wits reading his purposes, and revengeful hatred ready to slaughter him.

When the news came that Jack had lost his life in the very enterprise Wesley had contemplated, Kate collapsed under the shock. Now, when it was too late, she convinced herself that he was innocent. If she could have recalled him to life, she cried in self-reproach, she would not ask whether he was all her first impulse had painted him. She had borne up with something like composure when Wesley's death came upon her; but now, tortured by a sense of responsibility in Jack's fate, she gave way to the grief she had so long repressed. If she had not upbraided him, if she had not accused him, in so many words, of murder, he would never have embarked on the mad plot of escape.

She had driven him to his death. She had sat silent while Acredale rang with calumnies against him. It was not too late yet to make reparation.

She would proclaim publicly that her brother had rashly courted his own death; that Jack had unknowingly shot him down, as many a man does, in battle, shoot his best friend. She resolved on the instant to go to the stricken family and make such expiation there as was in her power. But was there any certainty that the report of Jack's death was true?

Grievous mistakes of the same sort had been made repeatedly in the public journals. She was not able to formulate any plan at first. Her father was more morose than ever. He seemed in his way to deplore the young man's death, but not in pity, as she soon learned. Death had robbed him of a cruelly meditated revenge. She wisely made no comment when this brutal feeling betrayed itself; but for the first time in her life the girl shuddered at the sight of her father. The vague rumors of years, that had been whispered about him--rumors which of old had fired her soul with hot indignation, came back insidiously. She shuddered. Was she to lose all--brother, lover, father--in this unnatural strife? She had been so loyal to her father. She had been so proud of him when others reviled. She had felt so serenely confident of the n.o.bleness of his heart, the generosity of his impulses. She had always been able to mold him, as she thought. Could it be possible that he was human to her, inhuman to the rest of the world? Then her mind, tortured by newly awakened doubts, ran back over the events leading to the rupture with the Spragues. She groaned at the retrospect. It was injustice that had displaced Jack in the command of the company. It was injustice that had marked her father's conduct in the Perley feud.

Grief is a logician of very direct methods. Its clarifying processes work like light in darkness. Kate saw the past in her father's conduct with terrifying vividness. She realized that it was her father's harsh purpose that had arrayed Acredale against him. It was his pride and arrogant obstinacy that had brought about the loss of all she loved. The fates had immolated the helpless; were the fates preparing a still bitterer expiation? Life had very little left for her now, but she resolved that she would no longer be isolated by her father's enmities.

The great house had been gloomy enough for father and daughter during the last miserable months, but he still fled to her for comfort. It was one evening when he came in, apparently in better spirits than he had shown since Wesley's death, that she told him what had been filling her mind since Jack's death.

"O father, I think I see that our lives have been unworthy, if not altogether wrong. Surely such neighbors as ours could not all take sides against you, if you were in the right in all the feuds that have divided us as a family from the people of Acredale."

Then, in an almost imploring tone of reproach, she retraced the harsh episodes in the father's dealings with the Perleys, with the community, and, finally, the quarrel with the Spragues, involving in it the lives of Wesley and Jack. Her voice softened into tremulousness. She arose, and in her old pleading way pulled the s.h.a.ggy head down on her breast, pressing her lips on the high, bare forehead.

"Dear father, all this is unchristian; you have in reality been waging war against women and children. Jack was a mere boy, Richard is a boy. I don't go into other enmities, where you have used the enormous power of wealth to crush the helpless. If you had not alienated the Spragues and encouraged Wesley in overbearing Jack, my brother would be alive to-day.

My sweetheart--yes, Jack was dearer than all the world to me--he would not be dead to-day. Ah! father, father, what good comes of anger--what joy of revenge? You have brought about the death of these two boys. Is it not time to look at life with a new heart--with clear-seeing eyes?"

Elisha Boone sat quite still. He had listened at first with a flush of anger, which deepened as the girl pleaded, until it died away and left his face very pale. He pushed himself away from the clinging figure, as if the better to see her face. Then his head drooped. He sighed heavily, rose and without a word left the room. Kate heard him ascending the stairs, then the sound of his room door softly closing. Had the hateful fires of vengeance been quenched? It was her father's way, when resolutely opposed, to quit the scene and without confessing himself in the wrong, do as Kate urged. The next morning he was gone before she reached the breakfast-table. There was a note on her plate in his handwriting. She read with a sinking heart:

"MY DAUGHTER: If what you said last night is true, you can not be the daughter to me that you have been. I am going to Washington, and when I come back you will know that your brother was deliberately murdered, and that his murderer, even in the grave, is held guilty before all men of the crime."

The servant confirmed the tidings. Her father had arisen early and departed on the first train. What could it mean? Had he some evidence that she had not heard? Had Jack left papers incriminating him? Ah! why carry the hideous feud further? Why blast the melancholy repose of the living, by fastening this stain upon the dead? But they could not. She knew it. She could herself refute any proof brought forward. She would tell all. She would reveal their tender relationship, and surely then any one, knowing the young man's nature, would scout the a.s.sertion of his willfully shooting Wesley. But surely Olympia and Mrs. Sprague must be able to tell, and tell decisively, the circ.u.mstances in the tragedy.

She would go to them. She owed this to the living; she owed it still more imperatively to the dead. She had not seen Olympia since her return. Mrs. Sprague had been too infirm to see her when she called. But she would not heed rebuffs now. In such a cause, on such a mission, she would have stood at the Sprague door a suppliant until even the obstinacy of her father would have relented. On her way across the square she saw Merry coming from the post. She turned out of her way, and hurrying to the near-sighted spinster held out her hand, saying, softly:

"Ah, Miss Merry, I'm so glad to see you! I have been meaning to call on you ever since I heard of your return, but, what with sorrow and illness, I have put it off, and now I want you to take me home with you.

Will you not?"

The pleading tone, the caressing clasp of the hand, the sadly changed face, the somber black weeds, made the voice and figure so much unlike the old Kate, that Merry stood for an instant confused and blushing as she stammered:

"Bless me, Miss Kate, I--I--shouldn't have known you. Ah, I am very glad to see you; sisters will be very glad to see you, too. Do, do come right along with me. I'm afraid the parlor won't be very sightly, but you won't mind, will you?"

Kate squeezed the hand still resting in her own, and drawing the long veil back over face, she walked silently with the puzzled spinster, unable to broach the theme she had at heart. Merry spared her the torture of going at it obliquely.

"I have just been at the Spragues. Poor dears, they are in dreadful distress. Mrs. Sprague is preparing to go in search of the body, but Olympia won't give in that Jack is killed. She says that if he had been she certainly would have known it in Richmond, for there are couriers twice a day from the rebel outposts to the capital; that the Atterburys had taken special measures to learn the fate of the escaped prisoners; that, besides this, several young men in Richmond, who knew Jack well, had been sent down the peninsula with the prisoners, to befriend him in case he were retaken."

"And Olympia believes that Jack is alive?"

"Yes, firmly."

"Where does she think he is?"

"She believes that he is among a squad separated from the rest of the prisoners, near the Union lines. It was a.s.serted in Richmond that many had crossed the James River, and were making for the Dismal Swamp, or into Burnside's lines in North Carolina."

"Dear Miss Merry, I--I--think I won't go in now," Kate said, tremblingly. "I must see Olympia. Perhaps I can help them in the search for Jack, and you know there is no time to lose. I shall come and see you all soon."

She squeezed the astonished Merry's hand, convulsively, and shot off, leaving the bewildered lady quite speechless, so speechless that, when she reached the stately presence of Aunt Pliny, she forgot the commissions she had been sent to execute, and was at once reviled by the parrot as "a no-account dawdler."

Meanwhile, Kate, with wild, throbbing hope in her heart that kindled color in her pale cheeks and light in her weary eyes, sped away to the Spragues. There was no tremor in the hand that raised the dragon-headed knocker, nor hesitancy in the voice that bade the servant say that "Miss Boone requested a few moments' conversation with Miss Sprague."

Olympia came presently into the reception-room, and the girls met with a warm embrace.

"Ah, Olympia, I have been made so--so--glad by what Merry tells me!

You--do--not believe that your brother is dead?" Her voice faltered, and Olympia, gazing at her fixedly, said:

"No, I shall not believe Jack is dead until I see his body. Poor mother, who believes the worst whenever we are out of her sight, has given up all but the faintest hope. I shall not. I know Jack so well. I know that it would take a good deal to kill him, young and strong as he is.

Besides that, I know that the Atterburys would find means to let us know, if there were any certainty as to his fate. Poor Jack! It would be an unendurable calamity if he were to die before the monstrous calumnies that have been published about him are proved lies."

"Dear Olympia, that is one reason of my coming. In my horror at Rosedale, I, too, believed that John had been in a plot to entrap Wesley; but I--I--know better now, and I have come to tell you that it is no less my duty than my right to see that your brother's memory is made as spotless as his life."

"I knew it; I knew you would, do it; I told Jack so in Richmond, almost the last words I said before he set out on this miserable adventure. I told him you were not the girl I took you for if you could believe him to be such a dastard, when you had time to get over the shock of poor Wesley's death. You never heard the whole story of that dreadful night.

I must tell it to you--as he would if he were here, and I know you would believe him." The two girls sat down, hand in hand, and Olympia told the tale as it has been set down in these pages.

Kate was sobbing when the story ended. She flung her arms about Olympia's neck, and for a time the two sat silent, tearful.

"Oh, why didn't he tell me this at the time? It was not Jack's bullet that entered poor Wesley's body. Jack was at his right, at the side of the bed. Wesley's wound was on the left side, and the shot must have come from Jones's pistol!"

"I remember that; but Jack's remorse put all thought of everything else out of my head. I recall, perfectly, that the wound was in Wesley's left side. Oh, if I could only get that word to Jack! I If--"

"I'll get it to him if he's alive. I, or mine, have been his undoing! I shall make amends. Ah, Olympia, I--I am ashamed to feel so full of joy--forgive me."

"It isn't your fault, dear, that you didn't know Jack as we do," Olympia said, tenderly.

"What are your plans?" Kate asked, presently.

"Mother insists upon going to the peninsula and examining the ground, questioning all who took part in the pursuit, and seeing with her own eyes every wounded man in the neighborhood. I don't know whether we can get pa.s.ses, but we shall set out at once and do our best."

"O Olympia. I must--I must go with you! I shall die if I remain here doing nothing--helpless! Let me go. I can aid you much. I can surely get all the pa.s.sports required. I can do many things that you couldn't do, for my father--"

She stopped and colored. Her father! What was she rashly promising for him? Dead, he was bent on Jack's dishonor; living, he would never rest until Jack's life was condemned.

"Ah, yes--that's true. Your father is potent at headquarters. I can answer for mamma. We shall be delighted and comforted to have you. I shall need you as much as mamma needs me. We are only waiting for Mr.

Brodie's report. I don't expect much from his researches. It is only a woman's heart that upholds one in such trials as this search means."

The plans were agreed upon at once and the two girls separated, knit together by the same bond in more senses than one, for, while Olympia set out to rescue her brother, she secretly hoped that the search would bring her near some one else; and so, as soon as Kate had gone, she sat down and wrote Vincent of Jack's disappearance, asking his aid in finding such traces as might be in the rebel lines. She merely alluded to their projected plan, adding, in a postscript, that she would write him as soon as the party approached the outposts. Kate wrote at once to her father, at his Washington address, narrating her visit to the Spragues, telling him of the new hope that had come to her, and beseeching him to lend his whole heart to the distressed mother and sister. He should see her in Washington within a few days, and she counted on his sympathy with her to help to restore the lost son and brother if alive, to co-operate in giving the body honorable burial if he were dead. These letters dispatched, the party waited only to hear from Brodie. He came a day or two later, but he could give them no hope.

He had been repelled from all sources of information, insulted in the War Office, and denied access to the President. He was convinced that there were secret influences at work to obscure the true facts in the case of the escaped prisoners, but what the agencies were he could not guess. When Olympia told this to Kate, she was surprised at her look and response.

"I know the influences, I think, and I can discover the agencies. Take comfort. I believe Jack is alive. I promise you that I shall never rest until he is found, alive or dead."

"O Kate, what an impulsive ally we have gained! I wish Jack could have heard that speech; it would have put power in his arm, as poor Barney used to say."

Twenty-four hours later the three women were in Washington, Kate remaining with her friends, instead of joining her father at Willard's.