The Old Homestead Part 17

With a feeble and slow step, Chester entered the Chief's office, and rendered up his book and star. He stayed for no conversation, and only answered the words of sympathy with which he was received by a faint smile. It was raining when he went forth, and a thick fog fell low upon the ground. The night was drawing on dark and dreary, and everything seemed full of gloom. Chester walked on; he took no heed of the way, but turned corner after corner with reckless haste, one hand working in his bosom as if he could thus wrest away the pain that seemed strangling him, and the other grasping his walking-stick upon which he paused and leaned heavily from time to time.

It was now quite dark, and Chester found himself in one of those murky streets that lead out among the shipping. The air came in from the river struggling through a forest of tall masts, and, as it flowed over his face, Chester drew almost a deep breath, not quite, for a sharp pain followed the effort--a cough that cut through his lungs like a knife--and then gushed from his mouth and nostrils a torrent of blood, frothy, vividly red, that fell upon his hands and garments in waves of crimson foam.

Chester was standing upon the pier. Beyond him was the water--close by the tall and silent ships. He cast one wild glance on these pulseless objects and sat down upon the timbers of the pier, grasping the head of his walking-stick with both hands and leaning his damp forehead upon them. Faster and faster gurgled up the vital blood to his lips. Like wine from the press it gushed, and every fresh wave bore with it a portion of his life.

Chester thought of his home--his wife, his child--he would die with them, he would struggle yet with the death fiend and wrest back the life that should suffice to reach them. He pressed one hand to his mouth, he staggered to his feet--the staff bent under him to and fro like a sapling swayed by the wind. He advanced a single step; faltered, and, reeling back, fell upon the timbers. A sob, a faint moaning sound, answered only by the dull, heavy surge of the waters below, as they lapsed against the timbers of the pier. Another moan--a shudder of all the limbs, and then the fog rolled down upon him like a winding-sheet.

CHAPTER X

WAKING AND WATCHING.

Burning with thirst and wild with fever, She tossed and moaned on her couch of pain; With an aching heart he must go and leave her; Never shall they two meet again!

Never? Oh, yes, where the stars are burning O'er his path to Heaven with a golden glow, His soul turns back with its human yearning To watch her anguish and soothe her woe.

When Mrs. Chester awoke from her slumber, which had been one wild and harrowing dream, she inquired of the children, who were early to her bed, if their father had not come back, and if there was yet no tidings from the Mayor's office. They answered that he had but just left the house, and that he had been with her nearly an hour as she slept. She smiled gently, and closing her heavy eyes, turned her head upon the pillow, moaning with the pain this slight motion gave.

Mary went to the little supper table which she had spread in antic.i.p.ation of Mr. Chester's return, and came back with a bowl of warm tea in her hand.

"If you can only drink a little of this ma'am," she said, stirring the tea with a bright silver teaspoon, the last they had left of a full set, "it always does your head so much good!"

Mrs. Chester rose upon her elbow and attempted to take the tea, but her head was dizzy, and after the first spoonful she turned away in disgust.

"I cannot drink it. Oh, for a gla.s.s of cold, cold water!"

Mary ran into the next room and came back with some water. But it tasted tepid to the poor invalid, and she only bathed her parched mouth with it.

"You are ill, you are very ill, ma'am," said Mary; "this does not seem like nothing but a slight headache. May I run for a doctor?"

"We have no money to pay doctors with, my child," said the poor invalid, clasping her hot fingers together, "now that I am sick, who will earn bread for you all? who will comfort _him_?"

"I will do my best, and so will Isabel!" replied Mary, "besides, perhaps--"

The child paused and her eyes fell. She was about to say that perhaps the Mayor might not be so very hard on Mr. Chester, after all; but remembering the look and manner of that unhappy man, she could not say this with truth, knowing well, as if it had been told her in words, that her benefactor had no hope. "Perhaps," she added, "something may happen. When it was at the worst with me, you know something happened."

"And surely it is at the worst with us now," murmured Mrs. Chester, meekly folding her hands, "no, not the worst," she added, with a wild start, "for I am not a widow yet."

G.o.d help the poor woman. She was a widow, even then.

The two children sat up that night watching by the sick, and waiting for the father to return, who lay so cold and still upon the sodden timber of that dismal pier. They had eaten nothing all day--at least Mary had not--and now they cut the sixpenny loaf in slices and partook of it, leaving a small covered dish, which had been prepared for Chester, untouched. His supper was sacred to those little girls.

Hungry and worn-out as they were, neither of them even once glanced at it longingly. They were quite content with the dry bread, and even ate of that sparingly, for Mrs. Chester had asked for ice, and various little things in her delirium--she was delirious then--and the children ran out after everything she mentioned, hoping to relieve the terrible state she was in, till they had but one shilling left.

So they made a sparing meal of the bread--those poor little creatures--and a cup of cold water, for the tea must be saved for him and for her. "Children," they said, with tears in their eyes, "ought not to want such things."

With all her brave effort to sit up till her father came, poor little Isabel dropped to sleep with her head upon the table, weary and almost heartbroken, for she was not used to suffering like Mary Fuller, and her childish strength yielded more readily. After this, Mary sat watching quite alone, for Mrs. Chester had muttered herself into a feverish sleep, and the house was in profound silence.

Then came upon Mary Fuller a terrible sense of the desolation that had overtaken them. Dark and shadowy thoughts swept over her soul, leaving it calm, but oh, how unutterably miserable. This foreshadowing of evil fastened upon her like a conviction. She felt in the very depths of her being that some solemn event was approaching its consummation that very moment. She ceased to listen for Chester's coming, but hushing her tread, as if in the close presence of death, crept away to a corner and prayed silently.

There are moments in human life when persons linked together in a series of events may form tableaux, which stand out from ordinary grouping, like an ill.u.s.tration stamped in strong light and shadow on the book of destiny. Thus was Chester's household revealed on that solemn midnight.

Mary Fuller, upon her knees, her small hands uplifted, her face turned to the wall; Isabel, with her lovely head pillowed on her arms; and, through an open door, Jane Chester, in her feverish sleep, with the pale lamplight glimmering over them all--this was one picture.

Another, equally distinct in its mournful outline, was revealed to the all-seeing One alone.

Upon that dark wharf, among the motionless ships, that seemed like spectres gazing upon his hushed agony, Chester still lay, shrouded by the heavy clinging fog. The tide rose slowly lapping the sodden timbers which formed his death-bed, and creeping upwards, inch by inch, like the weltering folds of a pall. The whisper of these waters, black and sluggish, gurgling and creeping toward him, was the last sound poor Chester ever heard on earth.

Oh, it was a wretched picture that might have won pity from the ghostlike shrouds and spars which hedged it in as with a forest of blasted trees.

One more picture, and the night closes. The Common Council was in session. Both marble wings of the City Hall were brilliantly illuminated, and crowds of eager spectators gathered around the two council chambers. Some fifty or sixty poor and efficient men were to be turned out of office, and the populace were eager to witness the jocose and delicate way in which the New York city fathers decapitated their children. To have witnessed the smiling jests that pa.s.sed to and fro in the Board, the quiet and sneering pleasure of one man--the careless tone of another--the indifferent air of a third--you would have supposed that these wise men had met to perform some great public benefit. It seemed like a gala night, the majority were so full of generous glee.

And why should they not be jovial and happy in the legislative halls?

What was there to dampen their spirits in these gay proceedings? True, the heads of fifty or sixty families were thus playfully deprived of the means of an honest support. Efficient and experienced men were taken from almost all the city departments, and cast without occupation upon the world. Men who had toiled in the city's service, for years, for a bare livelihood, were suddenly cast forth to want and penury. It was in the season of a terrible epidemic, and physicians who had braved pestilence and death, heaped together in the great hospitals of the city--who had made a home of the lazar-house, when to breathe its atmosphere was almost to die--were among those who were to be given up as victims to party.

These men, some of them yet trembling upon the brink of the grave from pestilence, inhaled while n.o.bly performing duties for which they were scarcely better paid than the commonest soldier--these were the men whom our city fathers were so blandly and pleasantly removing from their field of duty. Was it wonderful, then, that the whole affair seemed quite like pastime to those engaged in it; or that they made themselves jocosely eloquent upon the subject, whenever one of the grave minority ventured to lift his voice against the proceedings?

When the two Boards broke up for recess, nothing could exceed the spirit and good fellowship with which they went down to supper. The Mayor was present, for having been an Alderman himself, he always knew when anything peculiarly agreeable to his taste was coming off at the hall. The President of the Upper Board was in splendid spirits, and altogether it was a brilliant scene when the Mayor took his seat next the President, and the aldermen and a.s.sistants ranged themselves on either side the groaning board.

With what relish the city fathers ate their supper that night! Birds worth their weight in gold vanished from their plates as if they had taken wing. Great, luscious oysters, delicately cooked after every conceivable fashion--canvas-backed ducks, swimming in foreign jellies--turkeys and roasted chickens, that went from the table whole, being too common for men who had learned to indulge in wild game and condiments at the cost of ten thousand a year--decanters, through which the wine gleamed red and bright, interspersed here and there with others of a darker tinge and more potent flavor--brandied fruit and rich sweetmeats, all shed their dull sickening fragrance through the tea-room. The flash of gla.s.ses in the light; the flash of coa.r.s.e wit that followed the drained gla.s.ses; the clatter of plates; the noiseless tread of the waiters--why it was enough to make the silver urn and curious old pitchers start of themselves from the side-board to claim a share in the feast. It was enough to make the public doc.u.ments, prisoned in the surrounding book-cases, shiver and rustle with an effort to free themselves from bondage.

The very fragments of that official supper would have fed many a poor family for weeks; but the city fathers really did enjoy it so much it would have been a pity to dampen their spirits by an idea so at variance with their action. They had consigned at least fifty blameless families to poverty that night, and surely that was labor enough without troubling themselves about the means by which they were to be kept from perishing.

You could see by the quiet smile upon the Mayor's lip, as he arose from the supper table, and helped himself to a handful of cigars from a box on the side-board, that he was in excellent spirits. A distinguished guest from the country partook of the city's hospitality that night, and as the two lighted their cigars, they conversed together on city matters.

"To-morrow--to-morrow," said his honor, "you must go over our inst.i.tutions--Bellevue, the Island, and the various Asylums."

The stranger shook his head.

"Not to Bellevue, if that is where your people are dying off so rapidly of ship-fever," he said. "I have a terror of the disease; why I saw it stated that half the physicians at your Alms House were down with it, and that three or four out of the number have died this season."

"Yes," said the Mayor, lighting a cigar, "the mortality has been very great at Bellevue, especially among the young doctors. They are peculiarly exposed, however."

"I should think," said the stranger, laying down his cigar, for he could not find the heart to smoke quietly, when conversing on a subject so painful, "I should suppose it would be difficult to find persons ready to meet almost certain death, as these young men are sure to do. It must be a painful task to you, sir, when you sign their appointments. It would seem to me like attaching my name to a death warrant."

"Yes," replied the Mayor, taking out his cigar and examining the end, for it did not burn readily; "it is very disagreeable. Why, sir, the city has paid, already, nearly five hundred dollars for funeral expenses; and there is no knowing how far it may be carried."

The stranger looked up in surprise; he could not believe that he had heard aright--that the Mayor of New York was absolutely counting, as a subject of regret, the funeral cost attending the death of those brave young men who had perished amid the pestilence, more bravely a thousand times, than warriors that fall on the battle-field.

But as he was about to speak again, several aldermen who still lingered at the table, called loudly for the Mayor.

"I say," said the Alderman, who has been particularly presented to the reader, leaning over the back of his chair, with a gla.s.s of wine in one hand--"I say, have you settled that Chester yet? My man is getting impatient."

"Hush!" said his honor; "not so loud, my good friend. Bring in the nomination to-morrow--I gave Chester his quietus this afternoon."

And so he had; for while this scene was going on at the City Hall, the two pictures we have given, were stamped upon the eternal pages of the Past, and so was this.