Part 10 (1/2)
”It might as easily have been I,” he mused as he went down the steps, and shuddered again.
”I doubt if it was fault of his or virtue of mine that determined which of us two should be the prosecutor.”
A RUSTY LINK IN THE CHAIN.
_”In the brainy that wondrous world with one inhabitant, there are recesses dim and dark, treacherous sands and dangerous sh.o.r.es, where seeming sirens tempt and fade; streams that rise in unknown lands from hidden springs, strange seas with ebb and flow of tides, resistless billows urged by storms of flame, profound and awful depths hidden by mist of dreams, obscure and phantom realms where vague and fearful things are half revealed, jungles where pa.s.sion's tigers crouch, and skies of cloud and hue where fancies fly with painted wings that dazzle and mislead; and the poor sovereign of this pictured world is led by old desires and ancient hates, and stained by crimes of many vanished years, and pushed by hands that long ago were dust, until he feels like some bewildered slave that Mockery has throned and crowned.”_
Ingersoll.
When I called, last Sunday afternoon, as was my habit, upon my old college friend--now a distinguished physician--I found him sitting in his office holding in his hand a letter. His manner was unusually grave and, I thought, troubled. I asked him, laughingly, if he had had bad news from beyond the seas--from his Castle in Spain.
”No, it is worse than that, I fear,” he said gravely. ”It looks to me very much like bad news from beyond the grave--from the Castle of Heredity in the realm of an Ancestor.”
”I hope, doctor, that you have not had,--that my little jest was not a cruel touch upon a real hurt.”
”Not at all, not at all, old fellow,” he said, smiling a little.
”It is not my own trouble at all; but--well, it set me to thinking strange thoughts. Shall I tell you about it? I should really like to know just how it would impress you--an intelligent man out of the profession.”
He placed the letter on the table beside him, looked at me steadily for a moment, and then began:
”It may be as well to say that I have never before ventured to tell the story of George Wetherell's curious experience, simply because I have always felt certain that to a really intelligent and well-in-formed physician it would be a comparatively familiar, and not specially startling (although a wholly uncomprehended) phase of human disorder; while to many, not of the profession, it would appear to involve such fearful and far-reaching results, that they would either refuse to believe it possible at all, or else jump to the conclusion that numerous cases which have only some slight point of similarity are to be cla.s.sed with it and explained upon the same basis.
”In regard to these latter persons, I do not intend to convey the impression that I am either ambitious to s.h.i.+eld them from the consequences of their own nimble and unguarded reckonings, or that by my silence in this particular instance I suppose that I have prevented them from forming quite as erroneous opinions founded upon some other equally misunderstood and ill-digested sc.r.a.p of psychological and medical information.
”But it has sometimes seemed to me that there were certain features connected with the case of George Wetherell which, in the hands of the ignorant or unscrupulous, might easily be used to the disadvantage of their fellow-beings, and I have therefore hesitated to lay it before any one who was not, in my opinion, both intelligent and honorable enough to accept it as one of the strange manifestations in an individual experience; and to understand, because of the innumerable conditions of mental and physical heredity--which were not likely ever to occur again in the same proportions--that therefore the same manifestations were, not to be looked for in a sufficient number of persons to ever make this case in any sense a type or a guide.
”Notwithstanding this, there are, as I said in the first place, certain features connected with it which many members of the medical profession will recognize; but they are none the less puzzling symptoms.
”The matter has been brought back with unusual force to my mind at this time, by a circ.u.mstance connected with one of Wetherell's children, which is detailed in this letter. It lends a new touch of interest to the malady of the father. To enable you to obtain even a fairly comprehensive idea of the strange development, it will be necessary for me to tell you, first, something about the man and his surroundings.
”To be as brief as I may, then, he was the son of a merry, whole-souled, stout, and, withal, mentally alert, Southern gentleman, who had taken the law into his own hands and duly scandalized the reputable part of the community in which he lived by giving his slaves (all of whom he or his wife had inherited) their freedom at a time and under circ.u.mstances which made it necessary for him to betake himself with some considerable alacrity to a part of the country where it was looked upon as respectable to pay for the voluntary services of one's fellowmen, rather than to pay for the man himself with the expectation that the services were to be thrown in.
”Of course it was imperative--not only for the peace, but for the safety of all parties concerned--for him to transport both his family and his freed-men to a place where it was at once honorable for a white man to do such a deed and for a black man to own himself. This he did; and while a number of the negroes remained in the service of the family, the son (on whose account, and to prevent whom from believing in and being enervated by the possession of slaves the step had, in great measure, been taken) had grown to manhood with a curious mingling of Southern sympathies and Northern reasoning and convictions.
”The outbreak of the war found the young fellow struggling bravely, with all the fire and energy of a peculiarly gifted nature, to establish a newspaper in a border State, and to convince his readers that the extension of slavery would be a grave calamity, not only for the owned but for the owner.
”His two a.s.sociates were Eastern college-bred men, and it was therefore deemed wisest to push young Wetherell forward as the special champion of free soil, under the illusion that his Southern birth and sympathies would win for him a more ready and kindly hearing on a subject which at that time was a dangerous one to handle freely, especially in the border-land then under dispute.
”But the three young enthusiasts had reckoned, as young people will, upon a certain degree of reason about, and calm discussion of, a question which at that time they still recognized as having two very strong and serious sides; for they had not taken the stand of the Abolition party at all. They called themselves free-soil Democrats, and were simply arguing against the extension of an inst.i.tution which they were not yet prepared to believe it wise to attempt to abolish where it was already established, and where there was seemingly no other peaceable or fair solution than the one of limitation and gradual emanc.i.p.ation, through the process of mental and moral development of the ruling race. This position was not an unnatural one, surely, for young Wetherell, and was only what might have been expected from the son of a man who had given practical demonstration of the possibility of such evolution in the slave-holding and slave-dependent cla.s.s.
”But, as I have intimated, the confidence and reasonableness of youth had led to a complete misconception as to the temper of the opposition.
It is quite possible that the frank, pa.s.sionate, free-soil editorials, if they had come from either of the Eastern men, might have been accepted as the delusions of youth, the prejudice of section, or, at worst, as the arguments of partisans; but from a man of Southern birth--the son of a law-breaker (you must remember that the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the slaves had been a serious infraction of the law, strange as that sounds to the ears of the present generation)--from the son of such a man they could mean only a malicious desire to stir up strife and cause bloodshed by making restless slaves dangerous and dangerous slaves desperate. The result was that one night, after the issue of a paper containing an article of unusual force and power, young Wetherell found himself startled from a sound sleep, in the back room of his office, by the smell of smoke and gleam of flame.
”He understood their significance at a glance, and knew that escape by the front door meant a reception by masked men, five minutes for prayer, and--a rope.
”Springing from the back window into the river, he swam to the other sh.o.r.e, and within a few days raised the first regiment of volunteers that the State sent in response to the call of the President, and cut adrift at once and forever from all effort to argue the case from an ethical or a financial outlook.