James Fenimore Cooper's Five Novels

by James Fenimore Cooper

  The parting shades of the night were yet struggling with the advance of day, when a powerful flash of light illuminated the hazy horizon, and the roar of cannon, which had ceased towards morning, was again heard. But this time the sounds came from the water, and a cloud rose above the smoking harbour, announcing that the ships were again enlisted in the contest. This sudden cannonade induced Lionel to steer his boat between the islands; for the castle, and the southern batteries of the town, all united in pouring out their vengeance on the labourers, who still occupied the heights of Dorchester. As the little vessel glided by a tall frigate, Cecil saw the boy who had been her first escort in the wanderings of the night, standing on its taffrail, rubbing his eyes with wonder, and staring at those hills, whose possession he had prophesied would lead to so bloody results. In short, while he laboured at the oars, Lionel witnessed the opening scene of Breed’s acted anew, as battery after battery, and ship after ship, brought their guns to bear on the hardy countrymen who had, once more, hastened a crisis by their daring enterprise. The boat passed unheeded, in the excitement and bustle of the moment, and the mists of the morning had not yet dissipated, when it shot by the wharves of Boston, and turning into the narrow entrance of the town-dock, it touched the land, near the warehouse, where it had so often been moored, in more peaceable times, by its simple master.

  Chapter XXXIII

  “Now cracks a noble heart;—good-night,

  Sweet Prince.”

  Shakspeare.

  * * *

  LIONEL ASSISTED Cecil to ascend the difficult water-stairs, and still attended by their aged companion, they soon stood on the drawbridge that connected the piers which formed the mouth of the narrow basin.

  “Here we again part,” he said, addressing himself to Ralph; “at another opportunity let us resume your melancholy tale.”

  “None so fitting as the present: the time, the place, and the state of the town, are all favourable.”

  Lionel cast his eyes around on the dull misery which pervaded the neglected area. A few half-dressed soldiers and alarmed townsmen, were seen by the gray light of the morning, rushing across the square towards the point, whence the sounds of cannon proceeded. In the hurry of the moment, their own arrival was not noted.

  “The place—the time!” he slowly repeated.

  “Ay, both. At what moment can the friend of liberty pass more unheeded, amongst these miscreant hirelings, than now, when fear has broken their slumbers! Yon is the place,” he said, pointing to the warehouse, “where all that I have uttered will find its confirmation.”

  Major Lincoln communed momentarily with his thoughts. It is probable that in the rapid glances of his mind, he traced the mysterious connexion between the abject tenant of the adjacent building, and the deceased grandmother of his bride, whose active agency in producing the calamities of his family had now been openly acknowledged. It was soon apparent that he wavered in his purpose, nor was he slow to declare it.

  “I will attend you,” he said; “for who can say what the hardihood of the rebels may next attempt, and future occasions may be wanting. I will first see this gentle charge of mine”—

  “Lincoln, I cannot—must not leave you,” interrupted Cecil, with fervour—“go, listen, and learn all; surely there can be nothing that a wife may not know!”

  Without waiting for further objection, Ralph made a hurried gesture of compliance, and turning, he led the way, with his usual, swift footsteps, into the low and dark tenement of Abigail Pray. The commotion of the town had not yet reached this despised and neglected building, which was even more than ordinarily gloomy and still. As they picked their way, however, among the scattered hemp, across the scene of the preceding night’s riot, a few stifled groans proceeded from one of the towers, and directed them where to seek its abused and suffering inmates. On opening the door of this little apartment, not only Lionel and Cecil paused, but even the old man, appeared to hesitate.

  The heart-stricken mother of the simpleton was seated on her humble stool, busied in repairing some mean and worthless garments which had, seemingly, been exposed to the wasteful carelessness of her reckless child. But while her fingers performed their functions with mechanical skill, her hard, dry eyes, betrayed the mental suffering that she struggled to conceal. Job still lay on his pallet, though his breathing was louder and more laboured than when we last left him, while his features indicated the slow, but encroaching advances of the disease. Polwarth was seated at his side, holding a pulse, with an air of medical deliberation; and attempting, every few moments, to confirm his hopes or fears, as each preponderated in turn, by examining the eyes of the subject of his care.

  Upon a party thus occupied, and with feelings so much engrossed, even the sudden entrance of the intruders was not likely to make any very sensible impression. The languid and unmeaning look of Job wandered momentarily towards the door, and then became fixed on vacancy. A gleam of joy shot into the honest visage of the captain when he first beheld Lionel, accompanied by Cecil, but it was instantly chased away by the settled care which had gotten the mastery of his usually contented expression. The greatest alteration was produced in the aspect of the woman, who bowed her head to her bosom, with a universal shudder of her frame, as Ralph stood before her. But from her also, the sudden emotion passed speedily away, her hands resuming their humble occupation, with the same mechanical and involuntary movements, as before.

  “Explain this scene!” said Lionel to his friend—“how came you in this haunt of wretchedness, and who has harmed the lad?”

  “Your question conveys its own answer, Major Lincoln,” returned Polwarth, with a manner so deliberate, that he refused to raise his steady look from the face of the sufferer—“I am here, because they are wretched!”

  “The motive is commendable! but what aileth the youth?”

  “The functions of nature seem suspended by some remarkable calamity! I found him suffering from inanition, and notwithstanding I applied as hearty and nutritious a meal as the strongest man in the garrison could require, the symptoms, as you see, are strangely threatening!”

  “He has taken the contagion of the town, and you have fed him, when his fever was at the highest!”

  “Is small-pox to be considered more than a symptom, when a man has the damnable disease of starvation! go to—go to, Leo, you read the Latin poets so much at the schools, that no leisure is left to bestow on the philosophy of nature. There is an inward monitor that teaches every child the remedy for hunger.”

  Lionel felt no disposition to contend with his friend on a point where the other’s opinions were so dogmatical, but turning to the woman, he said—

  “The experience of a professional nurse should have taught you, at least, more care.”

  “Can experience steel a mother to the yearnings of her offspring for food!” returned the forlorn Abigail—“no, no—the ear cannot be deaf to such a moaning, and wisdom is as folly when the heart bleeds.”

  “Lincoln, you chide unkindly,” said Cecil—“let us rather attempt to avert the danger, than quarrel with its cause.”

  “It is too late—it is too late,” returned the disconsolate mother; “his hours are numbered, and Death is on him. I can now only pray that God will lighten his curse, and suffer the parting spirit to know his Almighty power.”

  “Throw aside these worthless rags,” said Cecil, gently attempting to take the clothes, “nor fatigue yourself longer, at such a moment, with unnecessary labour.”

  “Young lady, you little know a mother’s longings; may you never know her sorrows! I have been doing for the child these seven-and-twenty years; rob me not of the pleasure, now that so little remains to be done.”

  “Is he then so old!” exclaimed Lionel, in surprise.

  “Old as he is, ’tis young for a child to die! He wants the look of reason; heaven in its mercy grant that he may be found to have a face of innocence!”<
br />
  Hitherto Ralph had remained where he first stood, riveted to the floor, his eyes fastened on the countenance of the sufferer. He now turned to Lionel, and in a voice rendered even plaintive by deep emotion, he asked the simple question—

  “Will he die?”

  “I fear it—that look is not easily to be mistaken.”

  With a step so light that it was inaudible, the old man moved to the bed, and seated himself on the side, opposite to Polwarth. Without regarding the wondering captain, he waved his hand, as if to exhort to silence, and then gazing on the features of the sick, with melancholy interest, he said—

  “Here, then, is death again! None are so young as to be unheeded; ’tis only the old that cannot die. Tell me, Job, what seest thou in the visions of thy mind—the unknown places of the damned, or the brightness of such as stand in presence of their God?”

  At the well-known sound of his voice, the glazed eye of the simpleton lighted with a ray of reason, and was turned towards the speaker, teeming with a look of meek assurance. The rattling in his throat, for a moment, increased, and then ceased entirely; when a voice so deep, that it appeared to issue from the depths of his chest, was heard, saying—

  “The Lord wont harm him who never harm’d the creaturs of the Lord?”

  “Emperors and kings, yea, the great of the earth, might envy thee thy lot, thou unknown child of wretchedness!” returned Ralph—“not yet thirty years of probation, and already thou throwest aside the clay! Like thee did I grow to manhood, and learn how hard it is to live; but unlike thee I cannot die!—Tell me, boy, dost thou enjoy the freedom of the spirit, or hast thou still pain and pleasure in the flesh? Dost see beyond the tomb, and trace thy route through the pathless air, or is all yet hid in the darkness of the grave?”

  “Job is going where the Lord has hid his reason, and his prayers wont be foolish any longer.”

  “Pray, then, for one aged and forlorn; who has borne the burden of life ’till Death has forgotten him, and who wearies of the things of earth, where all is treachery and sin. But stay, depart not, ’till thy spirit can bear the signs of repentance from yon sinful woman, into the regions of day.”

  Abigail groaned; her hands refused their occupation, and her head sunk on her bosom in abject misery. From this posture of self-abasement and grief, the woman raised herself to her feet, and putting aside the careless tresses of dark hair, which, though, here and there, streaked with gray, retained much of their youthful gloss, she looked about her with a face so haggard, and eyes so fearfully wild, that the common attention was instantly attracted to her movements.

  “The time has come, and neither fear nor shame shall longer tie my tongue,” she said. “The hand of providence is too manifest in this assemblage around the death-bed of that boy, to be unheeded. Major Lincoln, in that stricken and helpless child, you see one who shares your blood, though he has been a stranger to your happiness. Job is your brother!”

  “Grief has maddened her!” exclaimed Cecil—“she knows not what she utters.”

  “’Tis true!” said the calm tones of Ralph.

  “Listen,” continued Abigail; “a terrible witness, sent hither by heaven, speaks to attest I tell no lie. The secret of my transgression is known to him, when I had thought it buried in the affection of one only who owed me every thing.”

  “Woman!” said Lionel, “in attempting to deceive me, you deceive yourself. Though a voice from heaven should declare the truth of thy damnable tale, still would I deny that foul object being the child of my beauteous mother.”

  “Foul and wretched as you see him, he is the offspring of one not less fair, though far less fortunate, than thy own boasted parent, proud child of Prosperity! call on heaven as thou wilt, with that blasphemous tongue, he is no less thy brother, and the elder born.”

  “’Tis true—’tis true—’tis most solemnly a truth!” repeated the aged stranger.

  “It cannot be!” cried Cecil—“Lincoln, credit them not, they contradict themselves.”

  “Out of thy own mouth will I find reasons to convince you,” said Abigail. “Hast thou not owned the influence of the son at the altar? Why should one, vain, ignorant and young as I was, be insensible to the seductions of the father!”

  “The child is, then, thine!” exclaimed Lionel, breathing with freedom—“proceed with thy tale; you confide it to friends!”

  “Yes—yes,” cried Abigail, clasping her hands, and speaking with bitter emphasis; “you have all the consolation of proving the difference between the guilt of woman and that of man! Major Lincoln, accursed and polluted as you see me, thy own mother was not more innocent nor fair, when my youthful beauty caught thy father’s eye. He was great and powerful, and I unknown and frail—yon miserable proof of our transgression did not appear, until he had met your happier mother!”

  “Can this be so?”

  “The holy gospels are not more true!” murmured Ralph.

  “And my father! did he—could he desert thee in thy need?”

  “Shame came when virtue and pride had been long forgotten. I was a dependant of his own proud race, and opportunities were not wanting to mark his wandering looks and growing love for the chaste Priscilla. He never knew my state. While I was stricken to the earth by the fruits of guilt, he proved how easy it is for us to forget, in the days of prosperity, the companions of our shame. At length, you were born; and unknown to him, I received his new-born heir from the hands of his jealous aunt. What accursed thoughts beset me at that bitter moment! But, praised be God in heaven, they passed away, and I was spared the sin of murder!”

  “Murder!”

  “Even of murder. You know not the desperate thoughts the wretched harbour for relief! But opportunity was not long wanting, and I enjoyed the momentary, hellish pleasure of revenge. Your father went in quest of his rights, and disease attacked his beloved wife. Yes, foul and unseemly as is my wretched child, the beauty of thy mother was changed to a look still more hideous! Such as Job now seems, was the injured woman on her death-bed. I feel all thy justice, Lord of power, and bow before thy will!”

  “Injured woman!” repeated Lionel, “say on, and I will bless thee!”

  Abigail gave a groan, so deep and hollow, that, for a moment, the listeners believed it was the parting struggle of the spirit of her son, and she sunk, helplessly, into her seat, concealing her features in her dress.

  “Injured woman!” slowly repeated Ralph, with the most taunting contempt in his accents—“what punishment does not a wanton merit?”

  “Ay, injured!” cried the awakened son—“my life on it, thy tale, at least, is false.”

  The old man was silent, but his lips moved rapidly, as if he muttered an incredulous reply to himself, while a smile cast its bright and peculiar meaning across the wasted lineaments of his face.

  “I know not what you may have heard from others,” continued Abigail, speaking so low that her words were nearly lost in the difficult and measured breathing of Job—“but I call heaven to witness that you, now, shall hear no lie. The laws of the province commanded that the victims of the foul distemper should be kept apart, and your mother was placed at the mercy of myself, and one other, who loved her still less than I.”

  “Just providence! you did no violence?”

  “The disease spared us such a crime. She died in her new deformity, while I remained a looker-on, if not in the beauty of my innocence, still free from the withering touch of disease and want. Yes, I found a sinful, but flattering consolation in that thought! Vain, weak, and foolish as I had been, never did I regard my own fresh beauty, with half the inward pleasure that I looked upon the foulness of my rival. Your aunt, too—she was not without the instigations of the worker of mischief.”

  “Speak only of my mother,” interrupted the impatient Lionel—“of my aunt, I already know the whole.”

  “Unmoved and calculating as
she was, how little did she understand good from evil! She even thought to crack the heart-strings, and render whole, by her weak inventions, that which the power of God could only create. The gentle spirit of thy mother had hardly departed, before a vile plot was hatched to destroy the purity of her fame. Blinded fools that we were! She thought to lead by her soothing arts, aided by his wounded affections, the husband to the feet of her own daughter, the innocent mother of her who stands beside thee; and I was so vain as to hope, that, in time, justice and my boy, might plead with the father and seducer, and raise me to the envied station of her whom I hated.”

  “And this foul calumny you repeated, with all its basest col­ouring, to my abused father?”

  “We did—we did; yes, God, he knows we did! and when he hesitated to believe, I took the holy evangelists as witnesses of its truth!”

  “And he,” said Lionel, nearly choked by his emotions—“he believed it!”

  “When he heard the solemn oath of one, whose whole guilt he thought lay in her weakness to himself, he did. As we listened to his terrible denunciations, and saw the frown which darkened his manly beauty, we both thought we had succeeded. But how little did we know the difference between rooted passion and passing inclination! The heart we thought to alienate from its dead partner, we destroyed; and the reason we conspired to deceive, was maddened!”

  When her voice ceased, so profound a silence reigned in the place, that the roar of the distant cannonade sounded close at hand, and even the low murmurs of the excited town swept by, like the whisperings of the wind. Job suddenly ceased to breathe, as if his spirit had only lingered to hear the confession of his mother, and Polwarth dropped the arm of the dead simpleton, unconscious of the interest he had so lately taken in his fate. In the midst of this death-like stillness, the old man stole from the side of the body, and stood before the self-condemned Abigail, whose form was writhing under mental anguish. Crouching more like a tiger than a man, he sprang upon her, with a cry so sudden, so wild, and so horrid, that it caused all within its hearing to shudder.