by Howard Pyle
It was all very simple. The former Grand Duke, her uncle, had determined upon a political marriage for her — she was heart-broken — her father had sympathized with her and had connived at her escape. She had gone to America under an assumed name and in charge of General Count von Arnheim, whom Huntford had known as Herr Vollmer. The Grand Duke had thought she was in France, and had searched for her everywhere; — that was why she had gone to America — that he might be misled. Her whereabouts would never have been known had not Fritz Zeigler, of the secret service, got track of her escape by steamer. Fortunately, when he had finally located her whereabouts in New York, it was just too late, for the Grand Duke had been assassinated. Then there was nothing to prevent her immediate return to Hesse-Gruenstadt. The Prince said nothing as to his own part in the romance, but Huntford could give a shrewd guess at what it had been, for he remembered how Fraulein Victoria had told him that she had no heart to bestow.
That afternoon Count von Arnheim called upon Huntford at his hotel. The old gentleman was very heartily glad to see him again. He was exactly the Herr Vollmer that Huntford had known in New York, before he had grown displeased at Huntford’s visits to the little house of Thirty-fifth Street; the same red face, the same white hair and mustache, the same military bearing, the same good-natured smile and kindly manners.
The Waltons remained in Hesse-Gruenstadt for nearly two weeks. They were invited to the ball at court. They attended a dinner at the Schloss, where Huntford and Evelina Walton were the recipients of particular civility. Huntford, and this time Miss Walton also, were hidden to another lunch, and altogether their visit was a crowning and glorious success. The hotel people were so civil that they were almost obsequious, and Huntford was the hero of the hour.
Of course he was asked to make one of that coaching trip through the Black Forest — Cousin Henrietta herself pressed him to join their party — and when they returned to America the two young people were engaged.
It is one thing to disapprove of the attentions to your daughter of a man who does nothing better than to paint pictures, but it is quite a different thing to welcome a son-in-law who is intimate with royalty.
THE END
A LIFE FOR A LIFE
Scribner’s Magazine Jan 1900
WHEN YOU ENTER Marley from the landward side of the town you pass from a poorly tilled, shaggy, straggling farm country, into a long, white street of heavy sand. All of the houses are built of frame and are generally new, sometimes making a pathetically obtrusive effort, with patent paint and scroll-work, to be pretty and tasty, but achieving only something garish and vulgar. Now and then, however, still standing among these ugly creations of a later generation, you come upon an old shingle house, gray with age and history, with long, sloping roof, dormer windows, and nearly always standing back behind a tangled garden of old-fashioned flowers.
Thus entering Marley, almost nothing betokens it to be a seaport town except the universal presence of the sand, an indescribable aroma of saltness in the air, and the fact that the curbs of the sidewalks are built out of the masts of wrecked vessels.
Then you suddenly come out upon the other — the salt side of Marley — and all is different.
A large, square, frame hotel, overtopping an irregular row of wooden houses, looks down upon a narrow, turgid stream of brackish water, called Marley Creek. The stream is spanned here and there by rough wooden bridges, with gates to keep the cattle from coming over from the salt-marshes into the town. Beyond the stream is a level sandy flat, half a mile wide, covered over with a sparse, wiry sedge-grass. Two or three sandy roads run out across the flat, and it is peppered over toward the bay shore with a scattering of frame shanties, and intersected here and there by ditches. Beyond this flat you see the smooth, bright bosom of the harbor and the ragged line of the Breakwater, with its squat white-washed lighthouse, and the light-keeper’s dwelling.
Within the shelter of the breakwater cluster the vessels lying at anchor — a fleet of coasting schooners, two or three foreign ships or barks, a pilot-boat, a great ocean tramp, rusty brown with the corroding weeks of briny water. The protecting arm of the sandy shore curves around and shuts in the harbor from the Atlantic beyond. Upon the smooth sand-hill at point of the cape rises far away the white towering column of the light-house. Beyond all lies the distant purple thread of the everlasting ocean, meeting the overarching sky at the sharp, keen line of far horizon.
This is the other face of Marley, and here you breathe a different air of a different life — a life that belongs to the ships in the harbor, to the pilot-boats, to the fishermen’s houses that lie scattered out along the sandy road that leads across the marsh to the water-front — a life that belongs to the light-house, the quarantine-station, the life-saving station, and the maritime exchange. The air is full of salt, and the eyes are full of wide spaces of sunlight, of infinite sky, of marsh, of water, of ships, of ocean. One side belongs to the dry, straggling, unkempt farm country, the other side breathes the salt air that sweeps gloriously in from across the sedgy salt-marshes.
The big square hotel is the Wilcox House. It fronts a little open, grassy space, intervening between it and the creek, called the “Battery.” Here a half-dozen old cannon of the War of 1812 still lie, pointing blankly out in the same direction in which they at one time threatened with yawning mouths Beresford’s frigates riding at anchor within the sandy shelter of the capes. Beyond lies the wide space of marsh, harbor, ocean, and sky.
Nearly always in front of the hotel you may find a lounging group, back-tilted in hickory chairs, discursively talking maritime matters or local gossip, and incidentally reciting facetious stories.
Just now it was the swift falling of a cloudy August twilight. A dry nor’-easter was blowing, and a low hurrying wrack of clouds threatening rain, but not spitting it forth, blew up from the bay and across the sedgy flat and overhead inland. The harbor itself was all a dim snarl of white-caps, and a fleet of coasting vessels rode at anchor back of the breakwater, pitching and tossing to the swift run of the choppy waves. Far away one could see the distant strip of the Atlantic Ocean, a gray, lumpy, ragged line against the fading gloom of the horizon.
Suppers were generally over throughout the town, and the usual evening back-tilted group of loungers was beginning to gather in the warm, windy dusk. You could hear the distant rattle of knives and forks and plates coming from the hotel dining-room, where the two Philadelphia gentlemen who had come down the day before, two coasting captains, and a solitary hardware drummer sat at a belated supper.
Abe Lynch had come over from the shore. He had been lounging about all day waiting for the weather to break, so that he might take the two Philadelphia gentlemen out fishing. He now sat back-tilted waiting for them to come out from the dining-room. He was a tall, lean, angular young fellow of about twenty-three or twenty-four, with a thin face burned to a leathery russet brown by continual exposure to the sun and the salt air. The skin of his horny hands had the same tough, leathery look as that of his face. He wore coarse clothes weather-stained to a colorless brown, and a gray flannel shirt fastened at the throat by a startlingly white porcelain button. His slouched felt hat was pulled down over his eyes, which shone bright under the shade, looking restlessly out this way and that. His lean jaws chewed intermittently at the cud of tobacco in his mouth. He belonged regularly to the Hennipen Life-Saving Station, No. 47, but he did not go upon duty until September 1st; during the summer months he spent his time fishing or aimlessly lounging, and now and then he and old Tony Bratton would take fishing parties out to the Breakwater at a dollar a head.
Old Tony had just finished his supper and was coming up the dusking street along a stretch of earthen sidewalk toward the hotel. He swayed a little as he walked, and he had been drinking. He was a grim, saturnine man, with shaggy iron-gray hair, a sun-tanned leathery face, and his lean cheeks nearly always prickled over with a frosty stubble of beard. He stopped in front of the group and stood with one arm clasped a
round the porch pillar, his jaws working cavernously as he chewed tobacco.
“Well, Tony,” said Tom Handy, “how goes it?”
“Goes like h — l,” said Tony.
A laugh followed.
“What does?”
“Jim Wilcox’s whiskey,” said Tony. “When you get a taste — it’s hot all the way down.”
Jim Wilcox, a stout man, was the hotel proprietor. He laughed. He, too, had finished his supper and sat in his shirtsleeves, chewing a toothpick. “Go in and tell Billy to give you a drink of it, Tony,” said he.
Old Tony Bratton was a notable character in Marley. The natives would point him out to a stranger with a certain pride. “See that man? That’s old Tony Bratton. He killed a man once right here in the town. Shot him with Downey’s duck-gun.”
It was true, and old Tony had only just escaped on the plea of self-defence.
Besides this he had once been a party in a rather notable lawsuit.
In his younger days, while he was still a pilot, he had run a Russian bark aground on the Gridiron Shoals. It had never been proven that the vessel had been wrecked intentionally, but everybody believed that Tony had been paid to run her aground. Indeed it was reported that he had told old John Marvel that he had not lost money by the job. Of course he had been broken as a commissioned pilot. Since then he had done a great deal of wrecking, and had made a snug living by breaking up the occasional wrecks that went ashore in the harbor. The year before the Philadelphia Wrecking Company had been organized, and since then old Tony Bratton had made a living from hand to mouth; now working for the wrecking company, now fishing, now taking parties out fishing to the breakwater, now taking sportsmen from the city down to Indian Head Bay in the late fall when the black-ducks and wild-geese were on.
The back-tilted group in the falling dusk were talking about the Philadelphians.
“I guess you didn’t take them two Philadelphia men out to-day. Did you, Abe?”
Abe Lynch sat for awhile in silence, as though he had not heard. The others waited expectantly. “No,” said he, at length.
“By golly!” said another speaker, “I’d like to seen ’em out to the break-water today. They’d a-got a bellyful of it.”
“Did they catch anything yesterday, Abe? I seen they didn’t bring in nothing but a little string of trout.”
Abe Lynch did not reply.
“Old Tony went out with you yesterday, didn’t he, Abe?”
Abe Lynch nodded his head.
There was a little period of silence.
“They fetched enough guns and fishing-lines with ’em,” said Tom Handy, the hack-driver, recurring to the two Philadelphia strangers, “ to kill all the birds and fish from here to Indian Head.”
There was another little space of silence. “One of ’em — that little fellow with the black hair — fetched a rifle with him, too. I hear him say he wanted to kill a bald eagle to take home with him.”
“What’d he want with a bald eagle?”. “I don’ know.”
“I reckon that’s so,” said Tom Handy. “I drove Mr. Willis over to the light-house yesterday, and I seen him out on the flats trying to come up with an eagle.”
The shirt-sleeved hotel proprietor sat listening with indifferent silence to the scattering talk. Presently Abe Lynch got up from his chair and went into the barroom where Tony Bratton still lingered after having taken his drink.
Meanwhile the two Philadelphia men sat eating their supper in the great dim expanse of the hotel dining-room. The table next theirs was occupied by the drummer, in solitary state; another, in a more distant part of the room, was taken up by two coasting captains who had come over from the harbor during the afternoon. Three or four -coal-oil lamps that hung in brackets about the wall filled the room with a dull, yellow light. The heavy silence was broken only by the clicking and clattering of knives and forks. It was a plentiful meal of corn-bread, fish, greasy fried potatoes in little oblong china fishes, cold meat, tea in thick, massive, china cups, preserves, and apple-sauce.
The two Philadelphians had been lounging about the hotel all day, kept in by the storm, and it had been very dull and tiresome.
“Well, if this wind holds on to-morrow,” said Paton, “I tell you what it is, Jack, I’m going back to town again. It’s an awful bore loafing about here with nothing to do.”
His voice struck out loud into the brooding silence of the dining-room, and the two coasting captains looked up almost furtively from their suppers. The waiter-girl, hearing the voice, appeared for a moment at the door of the dining-room, looked in and then disappeared once more into some unknown recess of the hotel from which she occasionally emerged with a fresh supply of food.
“Oh, well,” said Ellsworth, “it’s not likely this weather’s going to last any time. Like as not to-morrow’ll be a good, clear day. If it isn’t,” he added, after a pause, “we can go down along the beach after birds. I saw two flocks of curlew fly over this afternoon. I shouldn’t be surprised if we’d find plenty of birds down about Indian Head to-morrow. We’ll get Handy to drive us over in that two-seated hack of his.”
“You’d better get old Tony Bratton to go with you if you’re going clown to the bay,” said the drummer, cutting into the dialogue.
Ellsworth did not reply, but he stared at his interlocutor with strong disapproval. After that the two said no more, but finished their supper in silence. They pushed back their chairs, grating noisily upon the bare floor, and arose, turning into the long passage-way, picking up their hats as they passed and going out into the warm, gusty darkness. The figures of the loungers still sat dim and indistinct, tilted back against the wall. Ellsworth offered Paton “No,” said Lynch, “I’m not going in.”
Old Tony stood for awhile without speaking. He swayed a little in the sudden strong blowing of the wind.
“Who the — is Mace Green, anyhow?” he burst out suddenly, “and who the — the Philadelphia Wrecking Company — a comin’ down here to Marley and takin’ the bread out of all our mouths? I don’t want Mace Green to come to see Maggie.”
“Yes, you do, too,” said Abe Lynch. “Anyhow, you let him come and you don’t darst to keep him away.”
“Oh, well,” said Tony, “I ain’t going to keep him away neither, and you know that, Abe Lynch. If I kep’ him away, why then I’m a goin’ to lose my job at wracking.”
“Well,” said Abe Lynch, “if he don’t keep away, it’ll be the worse for him some day. Damn if I don’t settle him some day.”
Old Bratton stood silent in the night.
“When I was as young as you is,” said he, presently, “I’d a shot the man that come between me and my gal.”
“Damn if I don’t shoot him some day,” said Abe Lynch.
Then the two men parted without any further words, Lynch going back toward the town and Bratton turning toward the house.
There was a singular likeness between the young man and the old man, and in that likeness perhaps was the affinity that drew and bound them together. Old Tony would have liked his niece to have taken up with Abe Lynch.
The Philadelphia Wrecking Company’s office was in the second floor of a tall, lean, white-washed wooden building, the gable of which stood facing the head of the bridge and the wide sandy road that ran out across the sedgy flat. There was a big-lettered sign across the face of the building which you could read almost as far away as the harbor beach. The company had been established about two years before, and Mason Green had come down to look after it. He had relatives in Marley, and so was indirectly connected with the place; but nevertheless he had been, and was still, regarded with a certain latent jealousy and distrust. The Marley people felt that he had come to a cigar. Each lit his weed, and then choosing empty chairs tilted back with the others. A flock of marsh-birds passing overhead whistled shrill and far from out the darkness. The light-house lamp had just been lit. The great dazzling eye blazed steadily out into the gray gloom, and there were other twinkling lights shining out over
the harbor. There was an all-pervading feeling of limitless saline emptiness filled by the fading twilight.
Old Tony Bratton and Abe Lynch left the bar-room together. They lingered for a time just outside the doorway whence the lights from within shone faint and yellow across the sidewalk and the sandy street. The wind was still blowing, in warm, strong gusts. By and by the two men, as if by mutual consent, turned and walked off down the street together in the direction of Bratton’s house, which lay beyond the outskirts of the town. They walked stumblingly on through the darkness and presently had left the scattering lights of the town behind them and were out in the gusty darkness of the night. The sandy road stretched away before them, just perceptible in the gloom. Always there was ever present the great blazing eye of the distant light-house flaming through the night. Neither of the two spoke, and by and by Tony’s house rose before them, a spare block of blackness against the night sky, the big willow-tree looming a shapeless shadow beside it. A faint yellow light shone from one of the windows.
“Damn if I don’t believe Mace Green’s in there,” said old Tony, breaking the silence for the first time since they had left the hotel. “You wait here, Abe, an’ I’ll slip around to the winder an’ take a look.”
Abe stood watching the old man’s receding figure as he went down along the shingled side of the house, and then the sudden yellow illumination of his face as he raised himself and peeped in at the window. He stood there looking in for some time, his jaws working cavernously the while. He often peeped in thus upon his niece and her company. By and by he left the window and came back to where Abe stood waiting for him.